What a website for a Bay Islands business should include (and cost).

4 October 2026

Most businesses in Roatán, Utila and Guanaja don't need a huge website. They need a small number of things to actually work: visitors find them on Google, understand what they offer in their own language, and have an easy way to message or book. Everything beyond that is optional. Here's what genuinely matters, what tends to waste money, and what shapes the price.

What actually belongs on the site

• Mobile-first, not mobile-friendly. Most visitors to a Bay Islands business site are on a phone, often on patchy hotel or boat wifi. The site should load fast and look right on a small screen first — desktop is secondary.
• Both languages, properly. Not a machine-translated afterthought, but real English and Spanish pages, since your customers genuinely split between the two.
• A way to act immediately. A WhatsApp button, a booking form, or a clear phone number, placed where a visitor actually sees it, not buried at the bottom of a long page.
• The practical basics, high up. Location, hours, how to find you if you're off the main road, and what to expect — these are the questions you already answer on WhatsApp every day, so answer them once on the page instead.
• Enough to be found. A real page title and description, a sitemap, and a Google Business Profile. None of this is complicated, but skipping it is the single most common reason a decent website never shows up in search.

Where businesses waste money

Relying on a Facebook or Instagram page alone. It's a fine place to post photos, but it's not a website: posts get buried by the algorithm over time, there's no real presence in Google search results, and you can't add a proper booking flow or menu to a social profile without it feeling bolted-on.

Building more pages than anyone will read. A fifteen-page site for a business that offers three services usually means visitors never find the two pages that matter. A focused five-page site that says exactly what you do, in both languages, outperforms a sprawling one almost every time.

Paying monthly for more than you use. Subscription site builders make sense for some businesses, but plenty of simple sites are better off built once, hosted cheaply, and left alone until something actually needs to change — rather than paying an ongoing fee for editing tools nobody opens after the first month.

What actually changes the price

There's no single number that fits every business, because the real cost drivers are specific to what you're building:

Factor	Why it matters
Number of real pages	A five-page site with real, distinct content costs less than a fifteen-page site, even in the same industry.
Booking or ordering built in	A brochure site with a WhatsApp button is simpler than a site with live availability, deposits or an online menu.
How much content already exists	Projects move faster, and cost less, when photos and text are ready rather than needing to be written and sourced.
Translation	Proper English and Spanish content takes real work on both sides, not just a translate button.
Ongoing support	A one-time build is cheaper up front; a monthly support plan covers hosting, updates and small changes after launch.

This is also why every project here gets a fixed, written quote before anything starts, instead of an hourly rate — you know the full price for your specific business up front, based on what you actually need rather than a generic package. As a rough guide for timing: a simple business website usually takes days to put together, a booking or ordering system takes one to four weeks, and a full mobile app takes one to three months. A typical quote is paid 50% to start and 50% on completion, with longer projects split into a payment plan.

Where to start

The fastest way to get an exact number for your own business is to just describe it: what you offer, who it's for, and whether you need bookings or a menu alongside the basics. More on what's included is on the website design page, and the full step-by-step process — including payment options — is on the process page.

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