Notes from Berlin: what a city of small shops taught us about websites

We are working from Berlin for a while this year, between London and home in Amsterdam. Different city, same job: making small businesses easier to find and easier to choose. And Berlin, more than any city we have worked in, is a city of small businesses. The Späti on the corner, the bakery with three tables, the studio that is one person and a very good camera.

A few things they do, without a website, that most websites forget.

They tell you what they are from across the street

Bread. Beer. Bikes. A window, a word, a light on. You never wonder what a Berlin shop sells. Compare that with the average homepage, which needs a paragraph and a scroll to admit what the business does. The shop window is the homepage. Make it say the thing.

They are open when you need them, and they tell you

The Späti's whole business is being open at eleven at night. The hours are on the door in letters you can read from a moving tram. Yet "are you open?" is still the most common question a business website fails to answer without a hunt. Opening hours belong on the first screen, and they belong in the map listing, and they have to be true on public holidays.

Prices are on the wall

Nobody in a Berlin bakery asks what a Schrippe costs; it is on a card, in pen. Half the business sites we review hide prices completely, as if the visitor might be scared off. The visitor was going to ask anyway. Hiding the number only means they ask a competitor who publishes one.

Nothing is decorative

There is no budget for it and no need. The counter, the product, the price, the person. The web version of this is a site with no slider, no stock photo, no "welcome" — the thing you sell, what it costs, how to get it, who you are. We have been building that way for a while. Berlin makes it feel less like a style and more like common sense.

The one thing they get wrong

Most of them have no website at all, or one that was made in 2009 by a cousin. The shop window works for the street. It does not work for the person two neighbourhoods away typing "bakery open Sunday" into a phone. That is where we come in, and it is also why the site should look like the shop: honest, direct, no marketing voice.

Back to Amsterdam in the summer. The lesson is packed already: build the website like a good shop window. Say the thing. Show the price. Be open.