The one-page site a solo consultant actually needs

The most common website a solo consultant builds is a small company's website with the staff removed. Five pages, a services tree, an About page written in the first person plural, and somewhere on it a team section containing exactly one photograph. Everybody who has spent time on the buying side of consulting recognises the shape immediately, and the recognition is not flattering.

Before arguing against it, the case for it deserves a fair hearing, because it is not stupid. A consultant charging real money is asking a client to route budget and risk through a single human being. Corporate buyers have procurement processes that assume a supplier is an entity. A site that looks like an organisation signals continuity — that the work will not stop because one person's child is ill — and there are sectors where a sole trader is quietly filtered out before anyone reads a word. That pressure is real, and plenty of people writing "we" are responding to it rationally rather than out of vanity.

It still does not work, for a reason that has nothing to do with honesty in the abstract. It does not work because the client finds out. They find out on the first call, when the person who wrote the proposal is also the person delivering it and also the person sending the invoice. At that moment the plural voice stops being a shield and becomes the first thing they learned about you that turned out not to be true. Whatever the "we" bought in the first thirty seconds, it is repaid with interest at the point where trust is actually being formed. And the people most likely to notice are the ones who have hired consultants before, which is to say the buyers you want.

The page is a filter, not a portfolio

The more useful reframe is not stylistic. It is about what the page is for.

Almost all freelancer-website advice treats the site as a showcase: display the work, display it well, and enquiries follow. For a consultancy of one, that is the wrong model, because your constraint is not demand. It is your own calendar. You can deliver a small number of engagements a year, and every hour spent on a call with someone who cannot afford you, or who wants a kind of work you do not do, comes directly out of the same finite supply. The bottleneck is qualification, not visibility.

So the page should be built to turn people away. Not rudely — precisely. It should let a stranger work out in one scroll whether there is a plausible engagement here, and it should make that judgement easy enough that the wrong ones close the tab without writing. A page that produces four enquiries a quarter, three of which convert, is doing better work than one producing twenty of which two do, and it costs you eleven fewer calls.

This is the individual version of the argument that a company website does one specific job and should be judged by the number attached to that job. For a solo consultant the job is almost always the second of the four — convincing someone who is already looking — and the metric is the share of first calls that turn into scoped work.

Five blocks, and nothing else earns its place

Everything a prospect needs before deciding whether to write to you fits on one scroll.

Who you are, in a sentence that names the work rather than the posture. Not "strategic advisor helping organisations unlock growth." What you do, at the specificity level of the actual engagement: pricing and packaging for B2B software companies; interim finance leadership during a funding round; supply chain diligence for mid-market industrials. The test is whether a competitor could sign their name under your sentence without changing a word. If they could, it says nothing.

For whom, stated narrowly enough to exclude people. Company stage, sector, size, situation. This is the block people soften most and it is the one doing the most work. A prospect two sizes too small should be able to see themselves not described.

The shape of an engagement. This is what almost every solo page omits, and its absence is why the enquiries arrive vague. Say how you work: a two-week diagnostic ending in a written recommendation; a fixed three-month retainer with a standing weekly session; four days on site and a report. Not a methodology diagram — the practical facts of what happens after they say yes, how long it lasts, and what lands on their desk at the end. Buyers cannot compare you to their internal option or to a firm until they know what they are buying.

Proof, in a form that survives being checked. Two or three engagements described by situation, intervention and outcome. Named clients if you have permission, anonymised by sector and size if you do not. One recognisable logo does more than nine unrecognisable ones, and a paragraph of specific work does more than either. Testimonials without a name and role attached are decorative.

How to start, with one route. A mail link or a booking link, not both, not a form and a phone number and a newsletter. Multiple routes look accommodating and produce hesitation.

That is the page. Everything else people add — a blog nobody updates, a services grid that splits one offering into four, a values section — is either the acquisition job in disguise or an attempt to reach a page count that feels professional. We have taken apart the general pattern of building more than the work requires in the piece on when a twelve-page website is premature; the solo case is the sharpest version of it, because a one-person page that stops growing is finished, not neglected.

A price floor removes the calls you were going to lose anyway

The block that causes the most argument is money, and the argument is usually framed as all or nothing: publish rates and lose negotiating room, or publish nothing and stay flexible. The third option is a floor.

"Engagements typically start at £15,000" or "my minimum is a two-week diagnostic" commits you to nothing about scope and does the entire qualification job. Someone with a £3,000 budget reads that line and does not write, and both of you are better off — you would have found out on the call, twenty-five minutes in, after they had already formed an opinion about whether you were worth it.

Put it near the engagement shape rather than at the bottom. A number without a description of what it buys reads as expensive; a number directly under "a two-week diagnostic ending in a written recommendation" reads as a price. Placement is most of the work here.

The objection is that a floor caps you at the floor. In practice the opposite tends to happen: a stated minimum is read as evidence that you have one, which is itself a signal about the tier of client you usually work with. The people who anchor to your minimum were never going to be your largest engagement.

Getting the page to exist is the hard part, and it is a solved problem

None of this is difficult to write. It is difficult to start, which is a different problem with a different fix.

Solo consulting pages do not die at the design stage. They die on the blank canvas — the weekend where the choice is between forty templates and nothing has been written yet, and the weekend after that, repeated for a year while the actual answer is a paragraph the person could have dictated in four minutes. The obstacle is not skill or money. It is that starting from nothing is genuinely harder than editing something.

Generated pages remove that step. reach is the version built for exactly this shape: you upload the CV you already have and a photo, answer a short form, choose a look, and it composes a finished one-page site — generated in about twenty seconds, live on a free subdomain in under two minutes if you want it to be. What you are then doing is correcting a draft, which is the work most people can actually do on a Tuesday evening.

The limits are hard and they matter here specifically. It makes exactly one page — one index.html, no sub-pages, no navigation, no site tree — so anything that needs a Services page and an About page is the wrong job for it. There is no CMS, so nothing on the page grows. The contact section is a mail link and profile links, not a form that posts anywhere. And you cannot connect a domain you already own: the only route to a custom domain is buying one through reach, which for a consultant already holding yourname.com is a straightforward blocker with no workaround. A custom domain also requires Premium, at $4.99 per month or $49 per year.

For the narrow question of a one-page site on your own domain, the field is cheap everywhere and the differences are in what you start from:

Route	Price	Billing
Carrd Pro Standard	$19	per year, annual only
Framer Basic	$10	per month, billed annually
reach Premium (domain bought through reach)	$4.99	per month, or $49 per year
Squarespace Basic	$19	per month billed annually, $25 month-to-month

Prices checked August 2026. Carrd is the least expensive way to one page on a domain, though note its custom domain starts at the $19 tier rather than the $9 one the pricing page leads with. What you give up at the low end is the draft: you begin with an empty template and write everything yourself, which for most people is the entire difficulty rather than a detail of it.

The page has a shelf life, and it ends when the second person arrives

One page is correct for one person, and it stops being correct the moment the work is delivered by someone other than you. Not when you hire an assistant — when a client can be served by a person who is not you.

At that point the plural voice becomes accurate and the page has to say things it currently cannot: who the other person is, what they cover, what happens when you are not in the room. That is a different object with sub-pages and probably a CMS, and it is worth building properly rather than extending. A generated one-page site is explicitly a disposable asset in that scenario — no HTML export, so nothing carries over but the words, which is fine, because the words were always the part worth keeping.

Plan for the replacement rather than against it. A page that has to serve you at one person and at six is a page designed for a company you do not have yet, which is how the five-page site with one photograph gets built in the first place. Buy the domain, keep the copy in a text file, and treat the site as the current answer rather than a permanent one. The wider version of this argument, including where the second page finally starts earning its keep, is in what a service business of one should put online.

Write the page in the voice you will use on the call. Everything else on it is negotiable.