Web design for consultants

Hiring a consultant is hiring a person, and betting a real problem on their judgement. Which makes it odd that most consultant websites work so hard to hide the person. The royal "we", the stock photo of a glass meeting room, a services page that could belong to any of forty firms. The one thing a visitor arrived to assess is the one thing the site refuses to show them.

The credibility paradox

There is a tension here. Look too big and you read as evasive. Any client worth having will discover you are one person on the first call, and now the site feels like a small lie told early, which is a poor start for a relationship built on trust. Look too small and you read as a hobbyist: a thin single page, no visible process, nothing that suggests you have done this before.

Most consultants respond by hunting for a safe point between the two. Size is the wrong axis. Nobody hires a consultant for being the right size. They hire for judgement, and judgement shows up in specifics.

What earns trust on a consultant's site

Four things do most of the persuading, and none of them are design flourishes.

• A point of view. Something you believe about your field that a visitor could disagree with. "We deliver tailored solutions" is not a point of view, it is the absence of one. The consultants whose sites work sound like someone with opinions, because opinions are the product.
• A specific offer. "Strategy and transformation" is wallpaper. A named engagement, who it is for, what it covers and how it runs reads like a professional who has packaged their thinking. Naming your offer is what makes you referable.
• A named process. Steps with names are quiet proof you have done this more than once. They also set expectations before the first call, which protects your time as much as it reassures the client.
• Proof you can check. "Delivered significant efficiencies" persuades nobody, because nobody can check it. Short case notes do the job better: the situation, what you did, and what changed, in the client's own words where you can get them. One kind, specific sentence from a real client is worth a page of adjectives.

Fewer pages, done properly

A consultant's site does not need to be big. It needs a home page that says who you help and what you fix, one page per offer, an about page that says something, proof, and a way to contact you. Five or six pages, each doing a clear job. If you publish, add a writing section, since a consultant who thinks in public rarely regrets it.

What you should resist is the mega-site: the extra service pages, the "our approach" section padded to look institutional, the resources hub with three items in it. Every page added to look bigger dilutes the one asset you have, which is a single credible voice.

Where I stand

I have not built a consultant's site yet, and I will not pretend otherwise. My recent work is an affordable housing platform, a mortgage adviser matching service and a film studio's portfolio. What that work shares with a consultant's brief is the part that decides whether a site works at all: structure agreed before any design happens, copy treated as the foundation rather than the filler, and one clear action on screen at every point. BrokerMatch is a business that lives or dies on one page earning the trust of anxious visitors. That is closer to a consultant's homepage than it first appears.

A process built for people who bill for their time

You sell hours, and an open-ended web project eats them. So the shape of the engagement matters as much as the result.

My builds are fixed price, agreed before anything starts: marketing sites from £2,500, conversion-focused builds from £5,000, set out on the pricing page. A typical build takes around three weeks. Draft copy is written for you, and your part is feedback and sign-off at scheduled points.

To arrive at the first call ahead, spend ten minutes with the project brief builder.