Swain-Tech Studio websites for small businesses and independent creatives

Websites for Consultants

Most consultants get work through referral and reputation. Somebody was recommended, somebody saw them speak, somebody worked with them before.

Which means the site is rarely where you are discovered. It is where you are checked, by someone who already has your name and is deciding whether to make contact — often on behalf of a committee, often while comparing you with one other person. When timelines depend on available capacity, work hours in a year is a useful reference for thinking about annual working time.

That is a narrower job than a marketing site, and it makes most standard advice wrong.

What the checker needs

Confirmation you are the right person. They have a name and possibly a vague description. The site must confirm the specialism immediately, in the words their industry uses.

Evidence of the level you work at. Not a list of skills — the kind of organisation, the kind of problem, the seniority of the people you work with. Someone deciding whether you can sit in a boardroom is looking for signals about that, not a competency list.

Something in your own voice. An article, a talk, a piece of thinking. This is the highest-value content on a consultant's site, because the buyer's actual question is does this person know things I do not? Nothing answers that like a page where you say something specific and possibly contentious. For an independent reference beyond this site, Wix is a useful place to compare approaches.

A reason to trust the claim. Named clients if permitted, sectors if not, results in whatever form you can honestly state.

An easy way to make contact that does not feel like a sales funnel. A senior person will email. Make the address findable.

What matters less

A long services list. Consultants often list everything they could do, which reads as availability rather than expertise. Three things stated confidently beat eleven.

Certifications and methodology logos, past the ones your field genuinely requires. In most sectors they read as junior.

A blog with three posts from two years ago. Worse than none — it suggests the practice went quiet.

A shop, a booking calendar, or anything transactional. Consulting engagements are negotiated. A "book a discovery call" widget can work, and for senior buyers it can read as a step down.

Pricing, which is genuinely different here

I argue elsewhere that silence about price reads as expensive. Consulting is the one category where that may be what you want.

Still, complete silence costs you time in mismatched enquiries. The workable middle:

State the shape, not the number. Day rate, project fee, retainer. Whether you take engagements below a certain size. Whether there is a minimum.

"I typically work with organisations of X size on engagements of Y length" does the filtering without publishing a figure, and it is the most useful sentence on many consultants' sites.

The about page is the most important page

Unusual, and true here. For a one-person firm the about page is frequently the most-visited after the homepage, because the visitor's question is about you rather than about a service.

What it needs: what you do and for whom, how you came to it, the kind of work you have done, a photograph where you look like a person someone would hire, and something that is specifically you rather than a professional summary that could belong to anyone.

The professional summary is the trap. Twenty years of experience delivering strategic outcomes across sectors describes nobody. Two sentences about the specific thing you find interesting will do more.

Practical

Your full name in the title of every page, because that is what people search. Include the sector if the name is common.

Speaking, writing and appearances listed somewhere. Third-party evidence carries more weight than anything you write.

A downloadable one-page biography and a decent photograph. People organising panels and boards ask for these constantly. Same principle as a musician's press kit.

Working links to your professional profiles.

No tracking on pages people read while deciding, if you can avoid it. Senior buyers in some sectors notice.

The honest recommendation

Four to six pages, a template, and most of the effort in the words. This is the category where writing matters more than design, because what is being assessed is how you think, and that only comes through in sentences.

Custom work earns its cost rarely — a substantial body of publications needing organisation, or a firm growing past one person. Otherwise put the money into one good photograph and a day of your own writing.

The short version