Rachel had been cleaning homes for about two years.
Most of her new customers arrived the same way. Someone whose house she cleaned gave her number to a friend, a neighbor or somebody at work, and eventually Rachel’s phone buzzed.
One Friday afternoon, she finished a job, packed her cleaning supplies into the car and checked a message from someone she didn’t know.
Hi. Monica gave me your number. We’re moving out of our apartment next Thursday. Do you do move-out cleaning on the east side of town?
Rachel did.
She started typing.
Yes, she worked on the east side. Yes, she did move-out cleaning. The price depended on the size of the home and what needed to be done. She would need a few details before she could give an estimate.
Before she finished, another message arrived.
Do you bring your own cleaning supplies?
Different person.
Rachel answered that one too.
Then she scrolled up through the week’s messages.
What’s included in a regular cleaning?
Do you come downtown?
How much for a three-bedroom house?
Do I need to be home while you’re there?
Rachel had answered all of them before.
Many times.
She had been thinking about putting up a small website. Sitting in her car answering the same questions again seemed like a pretty good reason to finally do it.
“Do you clean on the east side?”
Rachel opened a website builder that evening and picked a simple starting design.
The sample page had a photograph at the top, a large heading and some buttons.
Rachel replaced the sample heading with the name of her cleaning business.
Then she stopped.
What came next?
She looked back at the message on her phone.
Do you do move-out cleaning on the east side of town?
That she could answer.
Under the business name she listed the parts of town where she normally worked.
Then she added the three kinds of cleaning she currently offered:
Regular cleaning
Deep cleaning
Move-out cleaning
Underneath that she added a button:
Get an estimate
Rachel looked at the page again.
Someone who had never met her could now tell, in a few seconds, whether she worked in their area and whether she offered the kind of cleaning they needed.
Not bad for one page.
“What does a regular cleaning include?”
The next question was already waiting in Rachel’s messages.
She started adding the answer to the same page.
Kitchen counters and sinks.
Bathroom surfaces.
Dusting.
Vacuuming.
Mopping.
Then she started writing what was different about a deep clean.
Then move-out cleaning.
The nice simple page began getting longer.
And longer.
The Get an estimate button kept moving farther down the screen.
Rachel stopped.
She still wanted people to see the basic information as soon as they arrived. She just needed somewhere else for all the details.
She clicked Add Page.
This one she called Services.
Now she had room.
She made a section for regular cleaning and explained what she normally included.
Under that she added deep cleaning.
Then move-out cleaning.
When she went back to the first page, the long lists were gone. People could see what she offered, and anyone who wanted the details could open Services.
Rachel now had two pages.
“How much would it cost?”
Then came the question Rachel never had a neat answer for.
How much?
It wasn’t that she didn’t know how to price her work. She did.
The problem was that there wasn’t one useful answer.
A small apartment cleaned every two weeks was one job.
A four-bedroom house that had not been properly cleaned in six months was quite another.
Whenever someone asked for a price, Rachel usually had to ask questions first.
What kind of cleaning did they need?
How large was the home?
How many bedrooms and bathrooms?
Where was it?
When did they want it done?
Sometimes they got halfway through the conversation before remembering there were two enormous dogs involved.
Rachel could keep collecting all of that through five or six messages every time someone contacted her.
Or the website could collect it first.
She clicked Add Page again.
Rachel made a Get an Estimate page and put a form on it asking for the information she normally needed.
Name.
Email or phone number.
Area.
Type of cleaning.
Approximate size of the home.
Bedrooms and bathrooms.
Preferred date.
And a box for anything else she should know.
She filled it out herself once to see what happened.
A moment later, everything arrived together.
Rachel looked at the message.
Much better.
She went back to the homepage and connected the Get an estimate button to the new page.
Three pages.
“Will it be you coming to the house?”
Rachel was working on the site again the next evening when another message came in.
The woman had already asked about regular cleaning, and Rachel had given her an estimate.
Now she had another question.
Will it be you coming to the house, or do you send somebody else?
Rachel read the message twice.
Fair enough.
She was asking people to let her into their homes.
Some customers were there while she cleaned. Others gave her a key, left for work and came home later.
Her website said plenty about cleaning.
It said almost nothing about Rachel.
She clicked Add Page for the fourth time.
This time she knew exactly what the page was for.
She called it About.
Rachel put up a photograph of herself and wrote a little about the business: how long she had been cleaning homes, the areas she worked in and how she handled appointments.
She also explained that she did most jobs herself. If she brought someone along to help with a larger job, she told the customer beforehand.
That was how the business worked, so that was what she wrote.
A few paragraphs were enough.
Nobody needed Rachel’s life story to book a deep clean.
“Do you bring supplies?”
Rachel still had questions left to answer.
Do you bring supplies?
What if I have pets?
Do I need to be home?
Should I do anything before you arrive?
She looked at Add Page again.
She could make an FAQ page.
The builder was perfectly happy to let her.
Rachel wasn’t convinced.
Someone reading about her services would probably want to know about supplies and pets while they were there.
So she added a small Before your cleaning section near the bottom of the Services page.
Supplies.
Pets.
Being home.
Anything customers should do before she arrived.
Done.
Still four pages.
Rachel had a few before-and-after photographs too. She could have made a Gallery page, but a couple of the photographs made more sense beside the services they showed.
Two customers had also sent her nice messages after she finished their homes.
Those went where they fit too.
No Gallery page.
No Testimonials page.
The information had somewhere useful to go already.
The pages Rachel didn’t need
The starting design still had a Blog in the menu.
Rachel opened it.
There was one sample post waiting for her to replace it with something.
She stared at the blank screen for a little while.
Nothing.
Rachel wasn’t planning to publish a cleaning tip every Tuesday.
She was trying to clean houses.
She deleted the Blog.
The builder also offered a Store.
Rachel didn’t sell anything on the website, so that went too.
Events?
Rachel stopped at that one.
A cleaning event?
What would that be—a cleaning party? She brings the supplies and everybody else brings the drinks and snacks?
Actually, that could be kind of fun.
Maybe later.
Gone.
She could see why those choices were there. Someone selling handmade candles might need the Store. Someone regularly publishing useful articles might want the Blog.
Rachel needed neither.
She was still at four pages.
Before Rachel hit Publish
Rachel went through the site one more time.
Home.
Services.
About.
Get an Estimate.
She looked over the estimate form again.
People would be sending her names, phone numbers or email addresses, along with information about their homes.
Rachel had seen privacy links at the bottom of plenty of websites before without giving them much thought.
Now she had a reason to.
She checked what information the form collected, what happened to it after someone submitted it and what she needed to tell people about how it was used.
For her site, that meant adding privacy information, so people could see what happened to the details they sent her.
Rachel also put her booking and cancellation terms in writing. That way someone who accepted an estimate could see how appointments worked and what happened if they needed to cancel or change the date.
Those pages were different from Home or Services. Most people would not visit Rachel’s site looking for them first.
So she linked them at the bottom of the site, where people could find them when they needed them.
Other businesses might need different supporting pages. A store, for example, could have shipping or return information that Rachel had no use for.
Rachel added what made sense for the site she was actually running.
She checked everything one more time and hit Publish.
Rachel sends the link
Two days later another referral arrived.
Hi. Monica gave me your name. We’re looking for someone to clean our house every other week.
Normally Rachel would have started typing questions.
Instead, she sent the website.
A little while later, her estimate form came through.
East side.
Three bedrooms.
Two bathrooms.
Regular cleaning.
One dog.
Tuesday mornings would be best.
Rachel smiled.
This was usually the information she spent half a conversation collecting.
She worked out the estimate and sent it back.
A few minutes later, the reply arrived.
Tuesday works. What time can you come?
Rachel answered.
Then she looked back at the estimate form.
She hadn’t needed to ask where the house was.
Or how many bedrooms they had.
Or what kind of cleaning they wanted.
Or when they wanted it done.
They had already told her.
The questions that had been filling up Rachel’s phone had helped build her website—and now the website was answering them before she had to.
Not bad for four pages.