This is an old project, from back when we were doing more web design work for small businesses. I'm writing it up now because I was going through the archives and realised this little site taught us more than a lot of bigger ones.
The client was OrangeCity Cab — a family-run holiday service in Nagpur, India. "Orange City" is Nagpur's nickname, because of the orange groves surrounding it. The owner wanted a website. He had no particular opinion about what it should look like, other than "nice, not like everyone else's."
Here's what we learned, and what you might borrow from it.
Less is more (really)
Most small-business websites are crowded. Five banners, twelve services, three pop-ups, a chatbot, an animated background. The visual noise comes from a fear of "missing" something the customer might want.
We went the other way. Home page: a single big orange photograph of a temple at sunset, one line of text ("Packaged holidays around Nagpur"), one button ("See our tours"), phone number in the top corner. That's it.
The owner was nervous about it. He'd been looking at competitor sites, and ours felt bare. We asked him to show it to ten customers before we launched.
The customers loved it. "It looks trustworthy," one said. "Everyone else's site makes me think they're going to scam me."
That was the lesson. Crowded design looks desperate. Calm design looks confident.
One colour, used bravely
The whole site used one real colour: a warm, saturated orange — pulled from the actual oranges grown in Nagpur's groves. Everything else was white, black, and shades of grey.
This was, to be honest, a design choice made partly out of laziness. A limited palette is easier to be consistent with. But it ended up being the thing everyone commented on. "Oh, the orange website!" people would say, months after visiting. The colour became the memory.
If your brand has a strong colour, use it bravely. A little bit of an accent colour everywhere is cowardly. One big, confident area of brand colour is memorable.
Photography matters more than copy
The owner had old tourist-brochure photography from a printer he worked with. We didn't use it. Instead, we paid a photographer two days' worth of fees to shoot new photographs of the local landscapes, temples, and people.
The cost was real. The impact was bigger. The photographs did the work a thousand words couldn't. When someone lands on a travel site, they want to feel the place. Generic stock photography doesn't.
If you're building anything where the place matters — travel, restaurants, hotels, even real estate — spend the money on the photography. It's almost always the best line-item in the budget.
A booking form, not a contact form
Most small-business sites have a "Contact Us" form. Customer fills it in, you get an email, you reply. Useful.
But for a travel agency, we realised the next question after "I saw your site" is always "can I book this tour?" So we built a booking form instead. Date. Number of people. Tour. Pickup location. Phone. Book.
Within three months, bookings had tripled. Partly because the site was new, partly because the design worked, but mostly — the owner thinks — because the path from "interested" to "booked" was short and gentle.
If you can reasonably ask for the booking, the order, the signup — do. A smaller ask loses you the customer who'd have bought.
The final design, in a sentence
A warm, confident, orange website with one big photograph, one clear call to action, and a booking form that worked. Three pages: home, tours, about.
Total build time: two weeks. Total cost: about a quarter of what the client had been quoted by his cousin's "web developer."
The site ran for years. Eventually the business grew and they wanted something fancier, so it was replaced. But the owner wrote me a thank-you email last year, unprompted, remembering the original site fondly.
"The orange one worked," he said.
What I take from it
Every time we're tempted to over-design something these days, I think about OrangeCity Cab. One photograph. One colour. One call to action. Respect the customer's time. Spend money where it matters.
That's small-business web design, done calmly and well. If you're building something similar and want a second opinion, come say hi. These are still some of our favourite projects.
