Getting your business online in Bhutan

Most advice about “building a website” starts with choosing a tool. That is the wrong end. The tool is the easiest decision you will make and the one you can change later; the decisions that are expensive to reverse all happen before it.

Here is the order that works, why each step is in that position, and what each one actually costs.

Step 0: write one sentence

Before anything else, finish this sentence: “Someone lands on our site because they want to ______, and we want them to ______.”

A guesthouse in Paro might write: they want to see the rooms and know whether we have space in October, and we want them to send an enquiry. A dental clinic: they want to know if we are open on Saturday and where to park, and we want them to phone.

This is not a branding exercise. That sentence decides your homepage, what goes in your navigation, and what the button says. Skipping it is why so many small business sites open with a slideshow of mountains and bury the phone number three pages deep.

Step 1: collect your facts before you design anything

Nearly every stalled website project stalls in the same place: the design is finished and nobody has written the words. Gather these first, in a document, before you look at a single template.

• Your name, exactly as you want it written. Including whether it is “Pvt. Ltd.”, and whether you use the Dzongkha name anywhere.
• What you do, in three sentences a stranger would understand.
• Where you are. Not just “Thimphu” — the landmark people actually navigate by, because that is what they will use.
• Opening hours, including the ones that differ: Saturdays, government holidays, and whether the winter timing is different.
• Every way to reach you, in the order you want to be reached. If you would rather have a WhatsApp message than a phone call at 9pm, put it in that order.
• Your services or products, with real names and, where you can, real prices.
• Photographs. At least one of the outside of the building, so people know they have arrived.

That list is roughly an hour of work and it is the hour that determines whether the site is finished in a week or in eight months. See what to actually put on a small business website for what to do with it.

Step 2: decide where the site will live

“Where the site lives” means two separate things that people constantly merge: the address (what someone types) and the hosting (the computer that answers). They can come from different places, and often should.

There are three practical arrangements:

A. A free address on someone else's domain

Your site is at something like yourname.sites.bt. You register nothing, you pay nothing, and it works the same afternoon. The cost is that the address is not yours — it says whose platform you are on, and if you ever move you leave the address behind.

This is the right starting point far more often than people admit. A working site at a borrowed address beats a perfect plan and no site, and you can add your own domain later without rebuilding anything.

B. Your own domain, pointed at a platform

You register yourbusiness.bt or yourbusiness.com, and point it at whoever runs the site for you. You own the address permanently. If you change platforms, you take the address with you and visitors never notice.

C. Your own domain, on hosting you already pay for

If your organisation already has hosting — many do, bought years ago along with email — a modern site can be a single file on it that pulls its content from elsewhere. You keep your existing arrangement and your existing bill, and the content becomes editable.

Step 3: the domain, if you want one

A domain is a rental, not a purchase — you hold it for a period and renew. The two questions that matter are which ending to use and where to register it, and both are covered properly in choosing a domain name.

The short version for a Bhutanese organisation: .bt says unambiguously that you are here, which is worth real money if your customers are local or if being visibly Bhutanese is part of what you sell. .com is what people type by reflex and is easier to buy from anywhere. Neither is wrong. What is wrong is a name you cannot say over the phone without spelling it.

Registration fees change and vary by registrar, so check the current price with the registry or a reseller rather than trusting a figure written on a web page — including this one. Budget for it annually, and set a reminder a month before it expires. A lapsed domain takes your site off the internet completely, no matter who is hosting it or what you have paid them.

Step 4: build the thing

With step 1 done, this is the fast part. Whatever you use, the shape is the same: put your facts in, choose how it looks, check it on a phone.

Check it on a phone first, not last. Assume most of your visitors arrive on a handset, often on mobile data, sometimes on a slow connection. A site that is beautiful on a laptop and unusable on a phone has failed for the majority of the people it was built for. If you take one habit from this guide, take that one.

Step 5: what it actually costs

Quotes for “a website” vary by a factor of fifty, which makes them look arbitrary. They are not — they are quotes for different things. Here are the real cost categories, so you can tell which one you are being sold.

That last row is the whole argument. A site built once for a large fee, with every subsequent edit going through the person who built it, has a running cost that is invisible at the point of sale and enormous afterwards — not in money, but in the changes you decide are not worth asking for. That is how a website becomes wrong.

The wrong turns we see most

• Buying a domain first and then stalling for a year. The domain renews, the site never appears. Start at a free address.
• Designing before writing. You end up with beautiful boxes full of “Lorem ipsum” and a project nobody wants to finish.
• Registering the domain in the builder's name. Make sure it is registered to you, with your email as the contact. This is the single most painful thing to fix later.
• No plan for editing. Ask, before you commit: “when the hours change, who does that, and what does it cost?” If the answer is vague, that is the answer.
• Testing only on the machine it was built on. Look at it on your own phone, on mobile data, outside your office wifi.

What finished looks like

Before you tell anyone the site is live, check all of these on a phone:

• Someone who has never heard of you understands what you do within five seconds of landing.
• Your phone number is tappable and dials.
• Your location is clear enough for a stranger to find you.
• Opening hours are correct this week, including any seasonal change.
• Every link goes somewhere real. No “coming soon” pages.
• You know how to change the hours yourself, and you have done it once to prove it.

That last one is not a formality. If you have never successfully edited your own site, you do not have a website you can maintain — you have a website somebody else maintains, and the difference shows up in about four months.