Websites
Our favourite Framer tricks for small business sites
Five little things that make a Framer site feel hand-made, from CMS-powered menus to scroll effects that don’t make anyone seasick.
Most small business websites get built once and then quietly gather dust. The owner is too nervous to touch anything in case the whole page falls over.
We build in Framer because it cures that fear. These are the five habits that make our sites feel hand-made on launch day and still tidy two years later.
Put anything that changes in the CMS
Our rule of thumb: if it changes more than twice a year, it belongs in the CMS. Updating a menu then means filling in a form, with no layout to break.
Content | How often it changes | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
Menu or price list | Monthly | CMS |
Journal posts | Weekly | CMS |
The About story | Rarely | On the page |
Colours and fonts | Almost never | Shared styles |
Once that split is made, owners stop being scared of their own website.
“I change the plant of the week from my phone, usually in the queue at the garden centre.”
Lena Voss, owner of Hello Plant Co.
Keep the motion gentle
One lovely moment beats twenty twitchy ones. Each page gets a single piece of movement worth noticing, and everything else sits still.
What earns an animation
Opening and closing. Menus, questions, anything that hides and shows.
One arrival. A headline that types itself in, once.
A reply. A button that reacts when someone taps it.
What doesn’t
Hijacked scrolling, parallax on every photo and paragraphs that fade in a line at a time. Your visitors came for the opening hours, not a fairground ride.
The seasick test
Flick through the page quickly on your phone. If your stomach notices, take half the effects out.
Build with styles, not one-offs
Every colour and text size on our sites comes from a shared style. Change the blue once and it updates on each page, button and footer link.
Components work the same way. We design one button and reuse it forty times, so a tweak on Monday doesn’t turn into a treasure hunt on Tuesday.
Picture the phone first
Most visits to a café or shop site come from somebody standing on the pavement, wondering if you’re open. So we sketch the small screen before the big one and check three things:
The hours and address sit near the top.
Every button is big enough for a thumb.
The text reads comfortably without pinching.
Leave yourself a cheat sheet
Our last trick isn’t in Framer at all. Every site we hand over comes with a one-page guide: where to change the hours, how to add a post and who to ring when something looks odd.
It takes us an hour to write, and it means the website keeps getting used. Want one built this way? Say hello and tell us what yours needs to do.
