A great many businesses in The Gambia operate entirely through a Facebook page and a WhatsApp number. Customers send a message, prices are quoted in the chat, and the order is agreed there. For some of those businesses that is genuinely sufficient, and it is worth saying so plainly before making the case for anything else.
This sets out what a website adds, what it should contain, what it costs to keep running, and what to look for in any proposal you are given — ours included. It is written to help you decide, including when the answer is not yet.
Check the free option first
If customers visit your premises, or you travel to them to provide a service, check whether you qualify for a free Google Business Profile before commissioning anything. It places your business on Google Maps with your hours, phone number, address and photographs, and it is what appears when somebody searches your name or looks for your kind of business nearby. For a shop, a clinic or a workshop serving people who come to it, that listing often does more day to day than a website would. Businesses operating entirely online are generally not eligible.
A website earns its place when you need more than a listing: when what you sell takes explaining, when the people deciding are not the people walking past, or when an unfamiliar buyer needs enough information to assess your business before making contact.
Where a website gives you more control
Facebook and WhatsApp can bring you customers and support sales, and for many businesses they already do most of the work. A website adds a stable place to explain your services, publish information and receive enquiries, with more control over how that information is organised.
- You decide the structure. Prices, terms, opening hours, location and contact details sit where people can find them, rather than scrolling out of view after a week.
- You control how much detail your services get, instead of fitting them into the shape of a post.
- It gives procurement teams and unfamiliar buyers a convenient place to review your services, contact details and supporting information before approaching you.
- It can carry evidence that is awkward to present in a feed: business registration, past work, and named clients where you have their permission.
- It belongs to you.
That last point deserves more than a line. A page on somebody else’s platform is space you occupy at their discretion: the rules, the reach and the account are all theirs to change. Accounts do get lost, sometimes to a compromise and sometimes to a policy decision, and the route to recovering one is not always open.
Ownership needs unpicking, though, because it is not one thing. The same domain can support your website and your business email, but hosting and email are separate services and you can start with either. Controlling the domain is also not the same as holding rights to the site’s code, content, photographs and any third-party components built into it. Renewing a domain does not by itself guarantee that the whole site can be moved intact.
What the site actually has to contain
Most of what makes a business website work is decided before anybody chooses a colour:
- What you do, written in the words a customer would use rather than the words your trade uses.
- Who it is for, so a visitor can tell in the first few seconds whether they are in the right place.
- How to reach you, on every page — phone, WhatsApp, email, and a form if enquiries need detail.
- Where you are, if customers come to you, with something more useful than a place name.
- Prices, or at least the basis on which you price, wherever you are able to publish them.
- Evidence: business registration, work you have done, and named clients where you have their permission.
A site can describe a business at length without ever saying plainly what it sells. If a visitor cannot work out what you do and how to contact you almost immediately, the rest of the design is not doing much for you.
It has to work on a phone, on mobile data
Most of your visitors will arrive on a phone, often on mobile data they are paying for by the megabyte. That changes what a good site looks like:
- Heavy image files cost the visitor money and time. Photographs should be sized for the web rather than uploaded straight from a camera or phone.
- Text should be readable without pinching and zooming.
- Buttons and links need to be big enough to hit with a thumb.
- Forms should be short. Long forms on a phone tend not to get finished.
Before you accept a finished site, open it on a mid-range Android phone using mobile data rather than on a laptop on the office wifi. That single check tends to surface most of what has been overlooked.
The domain is the part you must own
Register the domain in the business’s name, through an account the business controls. Not the developer’s account, not a staff member’s personal one. Know the renewal date, know who pays it, and keep the login somewhere more durable than one person’s memory.
This matters twice over, because the same domain can carry your email. We wrote separately about setting up business email, and the domain is the point where the two meet: lose it and you lose both.
Which ending: .gm or .com
Worth deciding deliberately rather than by default.
A .gm domain makes the Gambian connection explicit. Registration is subject to registry review, and the documentation and fees can depend on the name and the applicant. Ask an accredited registrar to confirm eligibility, the first registration period and the renewal cost before you order anything.
A .com is understood everywhere and is usually the cheaper option, but the particular name you want may already be taken or priced as a premium. Compare the names actually available to you, and compare renewal prices rather than only first-year prices.
Registering both and pointing one at the other is a reasonable approach. If you do, decide which is the main address and use it consistently everywhere, because splitting your presence across two addresses divides whatever standing you build in search.
What it costs after it is built
The build is a one-off. These are not:
- The domain, renewed on the registrar’s schedule. Confirm the billing currency, and whether exchange-rate movements affect what you pay at renewal.
- Hosting, monthly or annually depending on the arrangement.
- Content changes — new services, new prices, new staff, a corrected phone number.
- Technical maintenance: software and dependency updates, security patches, and checking that backups actually restore.
Content upkeep is the cost most often left out of the conversation, and a site that was accurate at launch and untouched for two years works against you rather than for you. Settle before you commission who will make routine changes, whether they can do it themselves through an admin area, and what you will be charged if they cannot.
Agree separately who maintains the software behind the site, who checks the backups, and who restores service after a failure — and whether that work is included in hosting or charged when it happens. It is the part of the arrangement that only becomes visible when something breaks.
What to look for in the proposal
Whoever you ask, these are worth getting in writing:
- Who owns the domain, the hosting account and the site itself once it is finished, and in whose name each is registered.
- What rights you hold over the code, the content and the photographs, and which third-party components carry their own licences.
- Whether you can edit your own content afterwards, and whether training on that is included.
- What happens if you stop working with the supplier — what you receive, and in what form.
- What has been done so the site can be found: page titles, descriptions, structured data, a sitemap, and the site submitted to Google Search Console.
- What is included after launch, for how long, and what is chargeable.
- The recurring costs, stated as numbers rather than left to be discovered.
On that fifth point, be clear about what it buys. Those steps help search engines discover and understand a site; they do not guarantee indexing, rankings or enquiries. Anyone promising you a position in the results is promising something they do not control.
A supplier who is comfortable putting the rest in writing is telling you something useful about how the relationship will go.
How we run the work
The shape is the same whether it is a few pages or a larger site:
- A conversation about what the site is for — enquiries, credibility, information, or selling — because that decides everything else.
- Structure and content agreed before design, including who writes what.
- Design and build, checked on phones as well as laptops.
- Search setup: titles and descriptions, structured data, and a sitemap submitted to Google Search Console.
- Google Business Profile setup for eligible businesses, including help with verification.
- Training, so routine changes do not require us.
- Handover: the domain and hosting in your name, admin access in your hands, and documentation of how it is put together.
Afterwards you can maintain it yourself or keep us on for support. The handover does not depend on which you choose, because a site you cannot administer without us is not a site you own.
If you are weighing it up
If you are not sure whether a website is the right spend for your business at this point, that is a reasonable question and we are happy to give you a straight answer, including when the answer is not yet. The same thinking applies to any technology purchase, which we set out in our IT procurement checklist.
Talk to Nexbridge about what your business actually needs: what the site would have to do, what it would cost to build and to run, and how long it would take. If what you need turns out to be a system rather than a set of pages, that is custom software development rather than a website, and it is worth establishing which one you are buying early.