Collegewise was in business for five years (1999-2004) before we ever had a website. It was too much money to hire a designer to do it. It would take too much time to write the content and approve the layout and test it. And (ironically), we just had too many students to focus properly on it.
If you’re a new private counselor or one who’s looking to start, here’s what I’d do (and what I should have done in retrospect).
Build a simple, no-frills, one page website. List the name of your business, your name (a lot of counselors leave that out and just refer to themselves as “We…) your address, a short description of what you do and who you do it for, your hours, your phone number, and a specific first step people can take if they want to find out more. Now people who’ve heard about you can find you on Google and get in touch with you. One page. Done.
If you don’t have the design skills or can’t afford a designer, start a blog. Use one of the preexisting templates that looks professional. Then write a post with all of the above information. And if you intend to actually write blog entries (a great idea, by the way), use the option most blogs offer to “feature” the first post, which will keep it at the top of your blog and make it the first thing people see. Now your blog does everything you need a website to do.
You need a website to make it easy for people to find and contact you–that's it. In the early stages of your business, you need to spend your time learning more about college admissions and taking great care of the people who’ve already hired you. You can build a fancy site later after you get the basics right.
It might feel like you’re not giving visitors enough information. But nobody makes an important decision like which private counselor to hire based on a website. And if you’re really good at what you do, people will hire you no matter how simple your website is.
Here’s a previous post with more advice.