A one-page website for a small business: what to put on it, and what happens to the enquiry

A small business does not need a full website to start marketing online. It needs one page that says who you are, what you offer and how to reach you, with an enquiry form on it, and it needs somewhere for each enquiry to land: with a record of where it came from and a person responsible for answering it. The page is the smaller half of the job. Most small businesses stall before it, on the domain, the hosting and the design, or after it, when enquiries arrive in an inbox that nobody is tracking.

Why does getting online stall for a small business?

Because it is a project, and the owner does it after hours. The Australian Government's business.gov.au guide, Set up a business website, lists ten steps: define your goals, register a domain name, choose hosting and a content management system, choose a design, plan the structure, create the content, secure it, test and launch it, promote it, then maintain, monitor and measure it. None of the ten is hard. All ten together are several evenings before a single customer has seen anything.

In practice it stalls in three places.

• Before the first word. A domain name, a hosting plan and a template are three decisions and three bills, and none of them is the business.
• At the blank page. Writing about your own business is harder than doing the work. The About paragraph is where most drafts stop.
• After the launch. The page is up, the form sends an email, and that is the last anyone knows. Which enquiries came from the page, and whether each one was answered, is not recorded anywhere.

The third is the expensive one. A website builder, a form tool, a spreadsheet and a mailbox are four separate things, and nothing joins the visitor at one end to the paid job at the other.

What does a one-page website need to show?

The same guide lists the pages a business site might have: an "about us" page, contact details or a contact form, descriptions of your services, customer reviews and testimonials, and frequently asked questions. On one page, each of those is a section.

Section	The visitor's question	Keep it to
Headline, and one line under it	What do you do, and is it for me?	One sentence each
Services or products	Is the thing I need here?	A card each: a name, a line or two, a photo if you have one
About	Who would I be dealing with?	One short paragraph: who you are, where you work, what you are known for
Getting started	What happens after I ask?	Up to four steps
Questions and answers	The doubt that stops me asking	The questions customers actually ask you
Contact details and opening hours	Can I reach you now?	Phone, email, and an address if customers visit
Enquiry form	How do I ask?	Name, a way to reply, the message, and a consent box

Write it in the order a stranger reads it. The guide's own content advice is to put the most important information first and to use simple words, short sentences and short paragraphs. A visitor on a phone decides in the first screen whether to keep reading.

Should you put customer testimonials on it?

Only genuine ones. The ACCC's page on online product and service reviews covers reviews on a business's own website, and says: "Reviews should be independent and reflect the genuine opinion of the person who experienced the product or service." It is against the law for a business to create fake or misleading reviews, or to arrange for others to create them. The same page says reviews can mislead when they are written by family, employees or people paid by the business without that connection being stated, or when someone else edits them afterwards.

So use the customer's own words, ask before you publish them, and shorten without changing what they meant. Three real sentences from named customers do more than a wall of praise.

How do people find a page when there is no advertising budget?

Through the places your customers already look. The business.gov.au guide puts it this way: "Your website is the digital front door to your business, so you should promote it across your channels." For a small business those channels are mostly free.

• The website field on your Google Business Profile.
• Your email signature, your quotes and your invoices.
• Your social profiles, and the group chats where your customers already are.
• A QR code on the counter, the van, the business card or the flyer.

If some of your customers read Chinese and some read English, offer the page in both. A reader who has to translate your services in their head is a reader comparing you with someone who did it for them.

How do you know which enquiries the page brought?

By counting three things: how many times the page was opened, where those visitors came from, and how many of them asked. The guide's last step is to "continually monitor and measure the performance of your website to see if it's achieving your goals", and for a one-page site the goal is an enquiry.

Most analytics tools answer the first two questions. The third needs the page and the form to belong to the same system, so that an enquiry is counted against the page it was sent from. Without it you know the QR code on the van was scanned, and not whether anyone who scanned it became a customer.

Counting does not need to mean tracking people. A number of visits and a class of source, such as search engine or QR code, is enough to decide where to put next month's effort.

What should happen after someone presses Send?

This is where marketing turns into selling, and where a page on its own stops helping. An enquiry is worth exactly what the follow-up is worth. Five things need to be true of every one.

1. It is a record, not an email: the person, what they asked, and when.
2. It says where it came from, so the page, the campaign and the referral can be told apart.
3. One person owns it.
4. It has a next step with a date.
5. Somebody notices when it has gone unanswered.

A spreadsheet can hold the first two. The last three are what a CRM is for, and the reason is covered in what an AI CRM does, and what it should never do without you. Once a quote has gone out, the rhythm for chasing it is in how to follow up a quote without becoming a nuisance.

How does HarvestFlow Grow put the page and the follow-up together?

HarvestFlow Grow is an AI CRM for Australian small businesses, and its Business page is the one-page website described above, attached to the system that holds your leads.

No domain, no hosting, no designer. The page is set up in Workspace settings and hosted at a HarvestFlow address ending in the name you pick. You choose one of three layouts and your colour, and changing the layout keeps everything you typed.

Your services, products and story. Tick the services you already keep in your workspace, or add your own cards with a name, a description and a photo. Add an About paragraph, up to four Getting started steps, a photo gallery, questions and answers, opening hours and the buttons you want: Call, Email, and Book where you have a booking link. Testimonials ask you to confirm they are real customers' genuine views, shared with permission.

Help with the blank page. Write it for me drafts the headline, the tagline, the About paragraph and your card descriptions from your business name, your introduction and your service names. Each suggestion sits beside what you have now; you press Use this, edit it, and nothing is saved until you press Save. It is never sent a contact, an enquiry or a customer's words, and a line it cannot back up from your own text, such as a number or a claim like "licensed", is left out.

English and Chinese. A page in one language can have a version in the other, with its own address and its own QR code.

Ways to share it. Copy the link, download a QR poster with your business name on it, or paste the address into your Google Business Profile as your website.

What the page brought in. The page shows this month's views, the enquiries sent from its form and the bookings made from its Book button, then where visitors came from: QR code, search engine, social app, AI assistant, another website, or direct. It counts numbers only. It stores no name, address or device with them.

The enquiry becomes a lead. The form on the page is one of your workspace's own web forms, so an enquiry arrives as a lead on a contact, with consent recorded when the box was ticked and the owner the form names: one person, or the next in a rotation. The starter automations add a follow-up task for that owner and send an acknowledgement email to an enquirer who ticked the consent box. A lead nobody has answered shows under Needs attention, with the reason.

The reply is yours. When the customer writes back, the AI can read the message and draft a reply. It never sends one; you read it, change it and press Send.

The Business page, the web form and leads are on every plan, including the free start. What each plan includes is on the pricing page.

Is one page enough?

For a business that sells by enquiry, such as a trade, a consultancy, a studio or a service, it is enough to start, and starting is what most small businesses have not yet done. Of the four things the business.gov.au guide says a good website does, one page covers three: it makes you look more professional, makes it easy for customers to find and contact you, and promotes your products or services. It does not do the fourth, letting customers buy your products online. A Business page shows what you sell and takes the enquiry; it is not an online shop.

The digital economy rewards a small business less for the size of its website than for what happens to the people who visit it. One clear page, shared where your customers already are, with every enquiry recorded, owned and followed up, is a system a business of one can run.

General information, not legal advice.