Your website

Your page lives at cleanflo.io/p/brennan-cleaning: your own company's name in place of that one. It is a real, server-rendered web page, not a screenshot and not an app: Google can read it and index it, Facebook and WhatsApp can build a preview card from it, and it opens on a five-year-old phone on a bad signal because there is almost nothing on it to load.

It is a builder, and what it builds is one page. You answer four questions, CleanFlo suggests one of fourteen designs, and you take it or look at the other thirteen. The fourteen are not fourteen colour schemes over one page: each is a different order. Blueprint shows a facilities manager your insurance before it describes a single service, because that is what they shortlist on. Sunrise puts what your clients said about you above what you charge. Deposit names a fixed price by bedroom before it says a word about you, because a tenant with a check-out on Friday is buying their deposit back, not a clean.

What it will not do is worth saying at the top as well. There is one page and there will only ever be one: no blog, no page per service, no page per town. The sections it can hold are a closed set of fifteen: you can reorder them, switch them off and change how each one is arranged, but you cannot invent a sixteenth. And nothing you can press makes the page unreadable: the ten controls over its shape do not set colours at all, and the one colour you do set is adjusted for contrast whether you like it or not.

The address reuses your company's existing slug, the same one your client portal links and your public quote link already use, so a business has one identity rather than three. That also means it is shown to you but not editable: portal links containing that slug have already been emailed to clients, and changing it would break every one of them. If you genuinely need a different address, ask support and they will change it for you.

See a finished one first

There is a finished example page at cleanflo.io/p/coastalcleaningdemo. Coastal Cleaning is not a real company: a bar across the top says so before you read a word of it, the reviews on it are invented and the form does not send, but everything under that bar is the real renderer doing the real thing, with a full set of services, photographs, questions and figures on it.

The bar carries three menus: Design, Colours and Lettering. Change the first one and watch. The page does not recolour, it rearranges, different sections, in a different order, arranged differently, with a different menu at the top. That is the one claim in this article you should not have to take on trust, and it is ten minutes well spent before you start on your own. The demo is kept out of Google deliberately, so it is not competing with anybody's real page for anything.

The Web Page screen

Web Page is the first item under Pipeline, the upper of the two groups inside Money in the sidebar, above Enquiries, Site Surveys and Quotes. It is filed with the money because it is where enquiries come from. Only the account owner sees it: a supervisor has no Web Page item in their sidebar and no route to it, because the page makes claims in the company's name.

The screen is one bar and two columns, and it does not scroll as a whole. The columns scroll inside themselves, so the page you are editing never slides away from the controls that edit it. The bar carries your address, whether the page is live, whether the last thing you typed is saved, and the buttons. The left column is your page as a list, top to bottom. The right column is your page as a page: a live rendering of the real thing at its real address, drawn by the same code a visitor gets rather than a lookalike drawn twice. Click a band in it and that section's controls open on the left; rest on a row on the left and the band lights up on the right.

The address

First thing in the bar, in a typewriter face, because it is what you paste into Facebook and read down the phone. It opens your live page in a new tab, and the two icons beside it copy the address and open the QR sheet.

A dot and three words

Not live yet before the first publish, Live once it is up, Unpublished changes whenever the draft has moved since. One glyph you can read from across the desk.

The figures, as a clause

On a live page the state is followed by · 214 visits, 6 enquiries in 30 days. That is the whole of the reporting on this screen and it is meant to be: a count of views and a count of quote requests, nothing about who, no cookie, no IP address, nobody followed anywhere. On a page nobody has visited yet it is left off rather than printing a nought.

Saving… / Saved

Every change writes itself to the draft about a second after you stop typing. There is no Save button to hunt for and nothing to lose by closing the tab halfway.

Desktop / Phone

Which width the right-hand pane renders at. Most of your visitors will be on the second one, so it is worth looking at both before you publish.

Undo and redo

They reach the words and choices on the panels, and not everything else. See Going live below, where what they do not reach is set out.

The publish button

Go live before the first publish, then Publish 3 changes with a count on it, then Up to date and disabled when the draft and the live page agree.

The ⋯ menu

Two items: Open your page, and Take offline on a page that is live. The second asks first.

Four questions, then a page

A page that has never had a design opens on Four quick questions rather than on a gallery of fourteen, and one question fills the sheet at a time. Fourteen designs side by side is not a choice, it is a wall, and standing in front of one at nine in the evening is the common reason somebody who runs a cleaning company never gets a website at all.

Every question can be skipped. The control reads Skip personalisation rather than a bare Skip, and the line under it says what skipping costs: We use what most cleaning companies pick. Skipping all four is a supported answer and not a mistake. It lands you on Sunrise, and the sentence explaining the choice says honestly that you did not tell us, rather than crediting you with an answer you never gave.

What kind of work is most of yours?

Homes, Offices and contracts, End of tenancy, Ovens, carpets, driveways, Windows and rounds, or A bit of everything. Three of those decide the design outright whatever else you answer: end of tenancy is always Deposit, ovens and carpets and driveways are always Reveal, windows and rounds are always Round. Those three trades have a shape, and no answer about your headcount should be allowed to override it.

How do you want people to reach you?

Ring me keeps your number on screen the whole way down. Fill in a form puts the quote form high and lets it do the asking. Either is fine offers both and shouts neither. Whichever you would rather answer on a Sunday evening.

Just you, or a team?

Just me, A small team or Several vans. This changes who the page is about: a person, or a firm. A solo cleaner's advantage over a franchise is that she is a person, and one of the fourteen introduces one before it quotes anything.

How should it feel?

Optional, and asked last: Friendly, Professional, Bold or Quiet. Colours and lettering only. By the time it is asked, the shape of the page is already decided by the three above it.

Then a recommendation, We would start you on Sunrise, with the colours and lettering your last answer earned, and two near neighbours beside it. Show all fourteen designs opens the rest; they were always one press away, they are just no longer the first thing you meet. Each one in the rail leads with who it is for and then a sentence saying what the page actually does, because that is the difference between them and a 78-pixel thumbnail cannot show it.

The design you are looking at is rendered at full size by the real renderer, not drawn as a picture. It arrives filled with example content: a made-up firm with a complete set of services, photographs and reviews, because a design cannot be judged on a page with one testimonial and no pictures. Switch Example content off and your own words go in instead.

The fourteen designs, and what each puts second

A design is an order. Each of the fourteen decides which section a visitor meets after your headline, how every section is arranged, whether there is a menu at the top and what shape it is, how square the corners are and whether anything moves as you scroll. The quickest way to tell them apart is to ask what comes second, because that is the question the design is answering: what does this customer have to know before they will read anything else.

Every design carries four palettes and three letterings of its own. Sunrise's colours are Sunlit, Seaside, Peony and Dusk; Megaphone's are Signwriter, High vis, Forge and Electric, and they are not the same four under different names. A palette that turns the whole page dark says · dark beside it, because "Dusk" on its own warns nobody. They live under the Design tab, headed with the design's own name, Sunrise’s colours, and the line beneath says the rest: Each design has its own four. Switch design in the gallery and these switch with it.

Switching design resets both to the first, which is right rather than annoying. The palette and the lettering are positions in a list that belongs to one design, so Metro's third is not Megaphone's third; carrying the number across would land you on a colour nobody chose.

Over the top of both sits Your colour: one accent, worn by your buttons, your links and your marks. CleanFlo darkens it as far as it has to so the text on it always reads, on every palette. That adjustment is not a matter of taste, it cannot be switched off, and it is precisely why it is safe to hand you ten more controls underneath it.

Ten controls, and not one of them a colour

Below the colours is a panel headed The page itself, and the sentence above it is the whole idea: Every one of these starts at "as the design does it". Change one and the rest still agree with each other. Each control opens on a tile reading Design’s choice, and every option is drawn rather than listed. Three to seven small pictures of what the option actually does, so choosing is a matter of comparing rather than imagining.

Not one of them sets a colour, and that is deliberate. Every one is shape, rhythm, arrangement or motion, so there is no combination of the ten that produces a page somebody cannot read, which is the only reason it is safe to offer ten at once to somebody who has never chosen a corner radius in their life.

Where a design already renders the value you are hovering over, the tile says Already how it looks rather than letting you press it and wonder why nothing happened. Gallery's photographs are already black and white; Megaphone's menu is already just your number. And when you have changed a few and want the design back, one line at the foot of the panel puts them all back at once.

Your page, top to bottom

The left column has three tabs. Sections is your page in the order a visitor meets it. Design is everything above: the gallery door, the colours, the lettering, the ten. Content is the same material filed by what it is rather than by where it sits, because an owner who wants to add a photograph thinks "photos", not "the seventh band down".

Under Sections, headed Your page, top to bottom, is one row for each of the fifteen, in the chosen design's own order. Every row moves up, moves down and shows or hides, and opening one replaces the list with that section's controls and a way back. A row with nothing behind it says Nothing here yet: a fact, not a telling-off, since a sole trader has no business with a team section and half of these are optional for most companies.

Opening a section gives you its Arrangement first: how that band is laid out, named in words rather than in code. Your services can be Cards, a Price list, a Numbered list, a Schedule table, Tiles, biggest first, a Price grid or a Ticked list, no prices. Your photographs have six arrangements; your hero has nine, including Before and after, draggable and Your initials and the year you started. Every one of them opens on Design’s own.

Under that, where the arrangement honours them: a Section heading in your own words instead of the design's, A line under the heading, a Background, a Width and a Heading position. Where an arrangement prints no heading at all, the heading box is not drawn, with one line saying which arrangement took it and that another will give it back. A greyed-out field reads as "yours once you find the trick", and there is no trick: the arrangement is the trick.

Five minutes to live

The checklist at the top of the rail is the short version: four things have to be true before a page is worth showing anybody, and the fifth is worth doing if you have it. It disappears once the page is live rather than staying as a permanent scoreboard. Every change saves itself about a second after you stop typing: the bar reads Saving…, then Saved.

Photos, and whose they are

The Photos panel says this above the upload button, before you have chosen a file, and it is worth reading rather than clicking past: Only upload photos you have the right to publish. Photos of a client’s home or premises need that client’s permission: the photos your cleaners take on cleans are never used here.

The second half of that sentence is a promise CleanFlo keeps on your behalf. Clean photos live in a different, private store and there is no route from it to this one, not a filter, not a "use on my website" button, nothing. A client agreed to their kitchen being photographed as proof the work was done; they did not agree to it being on a public web page, and one mistaken query is all it would take if the two were ever joined up.

The numbers from your own book

This is the part no template website can do. Under Proof there are two switches, both on by default, and both read straight from your CleanFlo records at the moment somebody opens the page, not frozen at the moment you published it.

Cleans completed in the last 12 months

A count of your finished cleans over the past year. It is not shown at all until there are at least 20 of them.

Average client rating

The average of the ratings your clients have left through the portal, to one decimal place, with the number of ratings beside it. Not shown until there are at least 5 ratings behind it.

The thresholds are the product's, not yours: they apply whether the switches are on or off, and there is no setting that lifts them. A page reading "4 cleans completed" or "5.0 from one rating" is worse than a page with no figures on it, and a number that can be created by asking one friendly client is not evidence. Below the threshold the figure is simply left out, and if both are below it the whole band goes. Under the figures the page prints, in small type, where they came from: Clean counts and ratings come straight from Brennan Cleaning Ltd’s own CleanFlo records.

The same panel carries What’s true about you: twenty-seven ticks in six groups, The basics open in front of you, the rest folded away with a count on each until you want them. The basics is what almost every householder scans, Fully insured, DBS-checked staff, Risk assessment on every clean, COSHH-trained, Uniformed team, Staff employed directly, not subcontracted. Accreditations is the one that decides commercial work: CHAS, SafeContractor, SSIP, Constructionline, TrustMark, without one of which you are not on a tender list at all. Then Trade bodies, Standards (ISO 9001, 14001, 45001, Cyber Essentials), Training and licences and Employment and reviews.

Ticking Fully insured opens a cover figure, chosen from a list running £1m to £20m rather than typed. Asked as free text most owners write "5 million", and one of the three ways of writing it produces a page that says £5 public liability.

Testimonials, and the tick that gates them

Up to six, under What clients say. You type the quote (up to 400 characters) and who said it (up to 80, Sarah, Truro is plenty), and the Add button stays disabled until you have ticked I have this client’s permission to publish this.

There is a longer road to the same place, above the box. What clients already said lists the sentences clients have actually left in your book, which no screen in this product used to show you. You cannot edit the words and you cannot type the name: the quote is the client's own message and the signature is their first name and the town the clean was in. Ask permission arms the row and names the person; Send it emails them, from you. The words go on your page only if that client answers yes. Two presses rather than one, because the thing being confirmed happens to somebody who is not in the room.

The quote form, and where it lands

The Request a quote section is the same form as your standalone public quote link, on the page itself: name, business name, email, phone, where it is, what needs cleaning, and when would suit. Two of those are required and at least one way to reply is required, exactly as covered in Enquiries and the public quote form. It carries the same hidden field a bot fills in and a person never sees, and the same rate limit.

What arrives lands in your Enquiries inbox at status New, badged in the sidebar like any other, and its Came from column reads Your website. A request through the plain link you paste into a message or embed on another site reads Quote form instead. That is the whole difference between them, and it is there so you can tell what your page is actually doing for you.

Going live, publishing changes, taking it offline

What visitors see is a snapshot, taken the moment you press the button. Everything you type between one publish and the next sits in the draft, visible to you in the right-hand column and to nobody else. That is deliberate: owners edit this at nine in the evening on a phone, and a half-typed headline should never be the thing a prospect reads.

Go live

The first publish. Available once the checklist's four required items are done, until then it is disabled, and hovering it says why: Finish the checklist first. Afterwards the bar carries the word Live.

Publish 3 changes

Every publish after that, with a count on it rather than a vague label, so you can see there is a gap between the draft and the live page and how big it is. What’s changed since it went live lists them before you commit, in the words the controls themselves use.

Up to date

The same button, disabled, when the published page and the draft say the same thing. Nothing to do.

Take offline

In the ⋯ menu, and it asks first: Take your website offline? Visitors will see a not-found page until you publish again. Nothing you’ve written is deleted. Everything you wrote stays exactly where it was; press Go live again and it comes back.

Undo and redo reach the words and the choices on the panels: your headline, your areas, your colour, your design, the ten controls. They do not reach everything, and the bar says so rather than letting you find out: Undo steps back through the words and choices on these panels. Sections, photographs, reviews, questions and people save as you change them. Moving a section, hiding one, adding a photograph, a testimonial, a question, a step or a team member each write straight to their own record the moment you press. Press undo after one of those and it refuses that press, with a line saying so, rather than quietly rolling back the last sentence you typed instead.

Under the publish button, shut by default, is Restore a previous version: the last five times you published, by date, with the one visitors are seeing right now marked. Picking one puts that version's words and choices back on the panels: your photographs, reviews, questions, people and prices stay exactly where they are, and it says all of that in the confirmation before it does anything. It does not touch your live page. Nothing changes for visitors until you press Publish, which is worth saying twice about a control people reach for while frightened.

Getting people to it

A page nobody links to is a page nobody visits. Google will find it on its own eventually: it is a real indexable page, listed in its own sitemap, but the links you place yourself are worth more, and they are ten minutes' work.

Your Google Business Profile

The single highest-value place. Paste the address into the Website field of your profile. That is the link most local searchers actually click, and until now most cleaning companies have had nothing to put in it.

Facebook

The Website field on your page, and the button at the top of it. Post the link once as well: it unfurls with your headline, your tagline and your cover photo rather than as a bare address.

The van, the flyer, the business card

Press the QR icon in the bar. It shows a QR code for your address with Download SVG under it: an SVG scales to any size without going fuzzy, which is what a signwriter or a printer will ask you for. Somebody stuck behind your van at a junction can scan it and be reading your page before the lights change.

Everywhere you already write your phone number

Your email signature, your quotes and invoices, the note you leave on a doormat. The copy icon beside the address puts it on your clipboard.

The "Made with CleanFlo" line

At the foot of the page, under your own name and town, sits one quiet line: Made with CleanFlo, linking back to cleanflo.io. It is set small, in CleanFlo's own teal rather than your colour, and it is the only thing on the whole page that is about CleanFlo rather than about you.

It follows the switch you already have: Show "Powered by CleanFlo" to clients on Settings → Company. Switch that off and the line goes from your website as well as from your portal footer and your client emails. The wording on the page also changes with it, with branding off, the note under your figures reads "from the company’s own clean records" rather than naming CleanFlo.

If you do not want a website at all

It is a feature module, like Messaging or Enquiries, and it has its own switch on Modules, under Account in the sidebar: Your website. Switch it off and Web Page disappears from the sidebar and the page stops opening for anyone, with the same not-found a stranger gets for an address that was never issued.