Meet the scenario: a two-person mobile welding business operating out of a shop just outside Chatham, six years in, all work by word of mouth. They have a Facebook page, no website, and a growing problem — commercial customers ask for a website before adding them to an approved supplier list, and there isn't one.
They do not need five pages. They need one good one, quickly.
Day 1: the intake
A twenty-minute call establishes four things: what they sell, who buys it, what they want a visitor to do, and what they already have.
| Question | Answer | What it changed |
|---|---|---|
| What is the one action? | Phone call, ideally with photos attached by text | Phone number in the header, a text-friendly number, no long form |
| Who buys? | 60% commercial/agricultural, 40% homeowners | Commercial credibility leads; the residential work is a secondary section |
| What is the blocker? | Being asked for a website by procurement | The site needs to look established, not clever |
| What exists? | Facebook page, unclaimed Google listing, no domain | Domain registration and profile claiming added to week one |
The most useful part of the call was the last five minutes, spent on what the project would *not* include. No online quoting tool, no gallery with filtering, no blog. Written down, agreed, and the reason the project finished in two weeks.
Days 1–3: the things that block everything
- Domain registered in the business's own name — $18/year, done on the call.
- Google Business Profile claim started. Video verification completed on day 3.
- Content list sent: services, the twenty questions they get asked, photos of recent work.
- Hosting provisioned.
Days 3–12: waiting
This is the honest part of every website project. Nine of the sixteen days were spent waiting for content. Not blocked on design, not blocked on development — waiting for photographs and for someone to write down what they charge.
What unblocked it was narrowing the ask. Rather than 'send us photos', the request became: five photos of finished welds, one of the truck, one of you working, and a voice memo answering these six questions. The voice memo came back that evening and was transcribed into the first draft of the copy.
Days 12–14: the build
About six hours, in four sittings.
| Task | Time | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Copy from the transcript | 2h | Structure, headline, five sections, FAQ from the six questions |
| Image preparation | 45m | Seven photos cropped, resized to 1600px, WebP, under 150 KB each |
| Page build | 1h 45m | Existing component system; no new patterns needed |
| Metadata, schema, sitemap, analytics | 45m | LocalBusiness schema, FAQ schema, GA4, Search Console |
| Review round | 45m | One consolidated round: two wording changes, one photo swap |
The revision round is worth noting. One round, consolidated, is a scope boundary rather than a limitation — it forces all feedback into a single pass, which is faster for everyone than three rounds of one change each. Both changes requested were reasonable and took eleven minutes.
Day 15: launch
- DNS pointed, certificate confirmed on both bare domain and www.
- Enquiry test submitted from a phone on cellular data. Arrived in 4 seconds.
- Sitemap submitted, home page indexing requested.
- Google Business Profile website field updated to the new domain.
- Facebook page updated. Email signature updated. Invoice template updated.
The money
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Launch One-Page (promotional rate) | $150 |
| Domain, first year | $18 |
| Managed Hosting & Care | $50/month |
| First-year total | $768 |
From the supply side, at the promotional rate: about six hours of build and roughly two hours of intake, coordination and launch. Eight hours for $150 is deliberately below cost. The launch package is an acquisition product; the recurring care is where the arrangement makes sense over time, which is why the promotional rate is capped at ten clients and excludes recurring services.
What happened next (modelled)
- Weeks 1–2: brand searches only. The site ranks for the business name almost immediately; nothing else.
- Weeks 3–6: the Business Profile begins appearing for category searches — 'mobile welding chatham' and similar. In a market this size that is a handful of impressions a day, not hundreds.
- Weeks 6–12: the FAQ section starts catching long-tail queries. Question-shaped searches are the first organic traffic most one-page sites see, because they are the least competitive.
- Month 3 onward: the constraint becomes reviews. With a verified profile and a decent page, the next material gain comes from moving from four reviews to twenty — not from anything on the website.
What we would do differently
- Ask for the voice memo on day one, not day nine. Nine days of the sixteen were recoverable and we recovered them by accident.
- Set up the review request habit at launch, while the enthusiasm is high. Introduced in month three, it starts slower.
- Photograph one job properly during the project. Seven decent phone photos were enough, but a single well-shot before-and-after pair would have carried the whole page.
Common questions
- Is a one-page website enough for a small business?
- For a business with one clear service and one clear action, often yes — and a good one-page site beats a neglected five-page one. You outgrow it when you have several distinct services that people search for separately, at which point each earns its own page.
- How long does a one-page website take to build?
- The build is a day or two of actual work. The elapsed time is driven almost entirely by how fast content arrives — two weeks is realistic when the owner is organised, and six weeks is common when photographs are the bottleneck.
- What should a one-page website cost?
- In this market, $300 to $1,500 depending on whether copy, photography and SEO setup are included. Below about $300 something is being left out — usually the strategy conversation, the SEO foundations, or any support afterwards.
- Do I need a website if I have a Google Business Profile?
- The profile will often produce enquiries faster, and it is the first thing to get right. But the profile links to a website, commercial customers frequently require one, and the site is the only part of your presence you actually control.