A website for the café down the street, prepared before they ask

Walk down any street with small shops and cafés and count how many of them have a website that's current. The answer is usually: the ones with a nephew who does computers. Everyone else has a social page, a menu photo from a few seasons ago and a phone number that may or may not be answered. SpicaSite is my attempt to fix that for small local businesses. It prepares a first version of your website from what's already public about your business, a person checks it, and you see a free preview before deciding anything. It's in beta.

Why small businesses don't have good sites

It isn't that small business owners don't want a website. It's that every path to one asks for something they don't have: time to learn a site builder, money for an agency, or patience for a back-and-forth about fonts.

And the person running a restaurant is busy running a restaurant. Asking them to write an About page from scratch is asking them to do a second job.

How a SpicaSite preview comes together

From a name to a preview you can look at.

You give your business name and city, or your current website.
A first version of the site is prepared from what's already public about your business.
A person checks it before you ever see it.
You get a free preview with no account and no obligation.
You decide whether to go ahead.

Nobody should have to write an About page before they've seen whether they like the site.

— why the preview comes first

Checked by a person, every time

The step I'm most stubborn about is the human check. What's public about a business online is often out of date or just wrong: old opening hours, a menu from before the chef changed, a photo of the shop next door. Software can collect it. A person has to look at it and ask whether it's actually right before a business owner sees it.

That's what makes it a personally prepared site rather than a template with your name pasted in.

What you get

Piece	How it works
Free preview	No account and no obligation
Your own domain	The site runs on your address
Changes by message	You ask and they're made and checked and published
QR menu	Your menu as a fast web page with a QR code

Menus that don't need reprinting

Restaurants get one extra thing I'm quite fond of. The menu becomes a fast web page with a QR code you print once. When prices or dishes change, the page changes. The sticker on the table stays the same.

It's a tiny thing that saves a surprising amount of hassle, and it's the kind of detail that only matters if you've watched someone reprint menus because one dish sold out for good.

Changes by message. After you go ahead, you don't learn an editor. You send a message saying what you want changed. It gets made, checked and published.

What's honestly still beta

SpicaSite is in beta. The free preview is real and available. Paid plans aren't published yet, so I'm not going to quote prices in this article or anywhere else until they are.

There's also no public gallery of finished sites yet. The examples page is empty for now, so the sample preview on the restaurant page is the closest thing to a look at the result today.

The other honest limit is the starting material. A business with almost nothing public about it gives the first version very little to work with. The preview will still be checked by a person, but it will need more input from the owner before it's ready.

Status: beta
Preview: free with no account
Paid plans: not published yet
Public examples: not there yet
Thin public info: needs owner input

Is it a fit for your business?

You're a small local business
You don't have a current website or you've outgrown the old one
You'd rather send a message than learn a site builder
You want to see a preview before paying anything
You run a restaurant or café and want a QR menu

Note: How it's built. In general terms: public information about a business goes into a structured draft, a person reviews it, and the approved site is served on the owner's domain. Change requests follow the same path: a message, a change, a check, a publish.