The sixty-second answer
One thing is strictly required: a short written brief saying who you are, what you sell, where you serve, and how people reach you. Photos, logos, testimonials and polish can all be added after launch. If you can write a page, your site can be built.
The short answer, and why it is short
Most small business owners believe a website build starts when everything is ready. It does not. It starts when the questions are answered. The gap between those two ideas is where thousands of Canadian businesses lose a year of being findable, waiting on a photographer, a logo redesign, or a moment of free time that never arrives.
So here is the honest requirement list. Strictly required: a written brief. Strongly recommended: your domain access, your real contact details, and your hours. Nice to have, whenever you get to them: photos, a logo, testimonials, and a colour you like. That is the whole list, and the order matters more than the contents.
This is not a small audience problem. As of December 2024 there were 1.10 million employer businesses in Canada, and 1.08 million of them — 98.2 per cent — were small businesses [1]. Almost every website buyer in this country is an owner-operator doing this between jobs. A process that assumes a marketing department is a process that never finishes.
What goes in the brief
Write it as if you were explaining your business to a competent stranger who will never get to ask a follow-up question. Five headings is enough:
Who you are. Legal or operating name, how long you have been going, and the one sentence you would say if someone asked what you do. If you have a licence, certification or trade ticket that matters to buyers, name it here.
What you sell. List the services or products in plain words, in the order that matters to you commercially. If one of them pays the bills and the others are occasional, say so — that decides what goes at the top of the page.
Where you serve. Towns, region, radius, or "anywhere in the province". This single line is what lets a search engine or an AI assistant tell a person in your town that you are the right call. Vagueness here costs more traffic than any design decision.
What you want a visitor to do. Call, book, email, request a quote, or walk in. Pick one primary action. Sites that ask for four things get none of them.
How to reach you. Phone, email, address if you have a public one, and hours. Check these against reality rather than against your last flyer — a stale phone number is the most expensive error a small site can carry.
If you want to add anything, add the questions customers ask you before they buy, and your honest answers. Those become your FAQ section, and they are the part of a small business site that AI assistants quote most often, because they are the only part written in the language a buyer actually uses.
What you do not need yet
Photos. Genuinely optional at launch. A build can use clean, relevant custom images from day one and swap in your own photography whenever you have it. We cover the trade-offs in detail in do I need professional photos for my website? — the short version is that photos improve a site and almost never make or break one.
A logo. A wordmark in a good typeface is a real logo. Replacing it later is a ten-minute change, not a rebuild.
Finished copy. You do not need to write the website. You need to answer the questions. Turning answers into pages is the job you are paying for.
A design opinion. Helpful if you have one, harmless if you do not. Say what you dislike; that is usually more useful than what you like.
The four things worth checking before you send the brief
1. Your domain. If you already own one, find the registrar login. If a previous developer registered it in their own account, start that conversation now rather than the week you launch. The ICANN Transfer Policy is firmly on your side: Registered Name Holders must be able to transfer their registrations between registrars, and where a registrar has applied a transfer lock it must be removed, or an accessible removal method provided, within five calendar days [7]. Our full walkthrough is in who owns my website and my domain?, and the .ca-versus-.com question is covered in should a Canadian business use .ca or .com?.
2. Any claim you want on the page. "Fastest in the province", "guaranteed to last twenty years", "cheaper than anyone in town" — these are performance claims, and under section 74.01(1)(b) of the Competition Act a performance or efficacy claim must be based on an adequate and proper test, with the burden of proof resting on the person making the representation [2]. Either you can back it up or it should not be on the site. We go deeper in what can I legally claim on my website?.
3. Prices, if you are showing them. Publishing prices is good for buyers and good for being quoted by AI assistants. Two rules follow it. First, the price shown must be attainable — the drip-pricing provision at subsection 74.01(1.3) treats a price that cannot be paid because of fixed obligatory charges as a false or misleading representation, excepting only charges imposed under an Act of Parliament or a provincial legislature [2]. Second, sales tax depends on where the customer is: the CRA is explicit that the rate of tax to charge depends on the place of supply, illustrating it with a Vancouver store that charges 13% HST when delivering to Toronto [5]. Say plainly whether your listed prices include tax. See how should I display prices with GST/HST?.
4. What happens to a form submission. If people can message you through the site, you are collecting personal information, and PIPEDA's Schedule 1 requires you to identify your purposes before or at the time of collection, obtain knowledge and consent, and make your policies readily available to the people you collect from [3]. This is a two-sentence answer from you — "enquiries come to my email, I reply, I keep them for a year" — that becomes a real privacy page. If you also intend to send a newsletter later, decide now, because Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation requires consent before commercial electronic messages and requires each message to carry prescribed identifying and contact information [4]; the place to solve that is an unchecked consent box on the form at build time, not a year later. Detail in what does CASL require on a signup form? and does my small business website need a privacy policy?.
Write it so a machine can read it too
One habit while drafting: put facts in text, not in pictures. A phone number baked into a graphic cannot be read by a screen reader, cannot be tapped on a phone, and cannot be quoted by an answer engine. The Accessible Canada Act names information and communication technologies as one of the areas in which barriers are to be identified and removed, working toward a Canada without barriers on or before January 1, 2040 [6]. The practices that satisfy that direction — real text, labelled fields, headings in order, sufficient contrast — are the same ones that make your business quotable. See how do I get AI assistants to recommend my business?.
Where we sit
We ask for the brief and nothing else. A maple.website build starts at $50, which covers 20,000 characters of copy, 4 custom images and 2 hours of work; past that, extra copy is $0.20 per 1,000 characters, extra custom images are $2 each and extra hours are $40 per hour, always quoted in advance. Hosting is $10 CAD per month including SSL, a CDN and daily backups, on a domain you own. All prices CAD; HST extra where applicable.
Turnaround is 48 hours from brief to live, and media can be added any time after. That sequence is deliberate: the site goes up, then it gets better. It is the opposite of the usual arrangement, where the site gets better and better in someone's head and never goes up at all.
If you can write one page about your own business, you are ready. If you cannot, the honest problem is not the website — it is that the business has not yet decided what it says to a stranger, and no amount of design will decide that for you.