Early in October I sat down with the two founders of a new home care business on the coast to sign off the design of their website. Most of my sites are for trades and service businesses, and a lot of what I'd normally do still applied. A few things didn't, because the people reading this site are in a very different spot.

Someone looking at home care is usually an older person or, more often, their son or daughter. They're often worried, sometimes in a hurry after a fall or a hospital stay, and often reading on a phone. That shaped most of the decisions below.

A typeface picked for reading, not looks

For the body text we went with Atkinson Hyperlegible. It was designed for readers with low vision, and the letters that usually get confused, like a capital I and a lower-case l, or 0 and O, look clearly different. The zero even has a line through it, which helps when someone's reading a phone number.

Headings are in a serif face, which gives the site some warmth. But anything people actually have to read is in the font that's easiest to read.

FAQs that answer the real worries

On most sites the FAQ is an afterthought. Here it does a lot of the work. The questions families ask before they ring are pretty consistent: can I stay involved, what happens if Mum's needs change, who are the carers and what are they qualified to do, and what does it cost.

So the FAQ answers exactly those, in plain words. If someone's reading at 11pm, they shouldn't have to ring the next morning just to find out whether they're allowed to be part of the planning.

No stock photos of carers

There are no photos of carers holding someone's hand. Stock shots like that look the same on every care website and don't tell anyone anything. The founders didn't want photos taken inside clients' homes either, which is the right call for privacy.

Instead the images have a local, coastal feel, and there's a section about the town they work in. Team photos will go in once the team's settled. Until then, a short bio for each founder with their qualifications does more than a posed group shot.

Trust next to each service

Rather than one "why choose us" block, each service has its own line of proof right beside it. Practical help at home, for example, notes that every worker is police checked and referenced. The reassurance sits where the question comes up.

There's also a three-step "how it works" section: a conversation, a home visit, then a service agreement. For someone who's never arranged care before, knowing the steps takes a lot of the fear out of making the first call.

The bits behind the website

A few decisions weren't about design at all, but they show up on the site:

  • One public email address. A shared inbox like hello@ goes on the site, and it can be handed to whoever answers enquiries without changing the address. Shared mailboxes in Microsoft 365 don't need a paid licence of their own.
  • A business number, not a personal mobile. Calls and texts go to a business number that can be passed between the founders, so nobody's personal number ends up online.
  • A PO box for the public address. Their office sits inside another practice, so it stays off the website and the Google profile.

None of this is unusual. It's the same thinking I use for a plumber or a cleaner, which is to work out who's reading and what they're worried about, then answer that first. Our guide on what to put on a service business website goes through the pages most businesses need.

If you're planning a site, try this first: write down the three questions people ask you most before they book. Those are your first FAQs, and probably your first headings too. If you'd like help building the rest of the site around them, that's the web design work we do.