The Website That Only Needed One Page

Derek Harding came to us with a new business, his own logo and no website. Yeovil Carpet Cleaning does carpets, rugs and upholstery for homes, rented properties, offices and village halls around Yeovil and Sherborne. He came on a recommendation, and what he needed was somewhere to send people who'd heard his name. The answer was one page.

The temptation with a new business is to build the site it might need in three years. A services section, an about page, a blog, a news page, and a testimonials page waiting for testimonials. It looks like more for the money. Mostly it's more pages to keep true.

Trust before price

Carpet cleaning is a job you invite a stranger into your house to do. So before anyone compares prices, they're deciding whether they'd be comfortable with this person in their front room. That decision gets made in a few seconds on a phone screen, because that's where nearly everyone would find him.

So the site had three jobs. Show the standard of the work. Answer the questions people ask before they ring. Keep his number within reach wherever they'd scrolled to. Everything else was optional, and most of it would have got in the way.

Forty pages nobody would read

A new business has no back catalogue. No case studies, no ten years of reviews, no blog anyone has time to write. Padding a site out with pages that say very little makes it look thinner, and every page you add is another page that has to be kept accurate when the prices or the hours change.

There's another reason, and it's about us rather than Derek. If we'd sold him ten pages, we'd have been selling him the size of the invoice. We stopped doing that a while ago. The advice comes first, and sometimes the advice is one page, done properly, with the rest of the money kept for the business.

What went on the page

It's built around Derek's own logo and colours, laid out for a phone first. It sets out the services, then walks through what happens from the first call to the finished room, so nobody has to guess what they're letting themselves in for.

Then the proof that counts on this kind of job: fully insured, allergy-conscious, clear pricing and a local name. A questions-and-answers section covers what people would otherwise ring to ask, which saves Derek answering the same questions on the phone all day.

The enquiry form asks for a postcode and a rough idea of the job. That's deliberate. It means he can plan a visit properly instead of driving across Somerset to quote for a doormat.

Same job, different size

A one-page site gets the same treatment as a build costing tens of thousands of pounds. The same questions at the start, the same explaining at the end, and the same rule that the owner should understand what they've paid for well enough to run it. Derek's feedback afterwards:

"Nothing was too much trouble and you explained everything perfectly. You're a professional at what you do and no one should hesitate to contact you."

I've written before about budgets that don't match the ambition. This was the other case: a modest budget, a clear ambition, and a site sized to fit both.

Being found comes next

A site on its own doesn't bring in work. For a local trade, the thing that decides whether you appear when someone nearby searches for a carpet cleaner is Google Business Profile, and that's the next thing to get right.

In six months we'll ask Derek what the phone has been doing, and the answer will go on his page in our portfolio. A case study without a result is only half a case study, and the result is the half that only the client can tell you.

If you're starting something and aren't sure how much website it needs, get in touch and we'll tell you straight, even if the answer is one page.