Websites for contractors and trades
Most of your visitors are on a phone, standing in a room with a problem in it. They are deciding in about twenty seconds whether you cover their area and whether you look like you know what you are doing. Everything else on the site is secondary to those two answers.
What this kind of site actually needs
- The phone number as a tappable link, near the top, on every page — not only on a contact page somebody has to find.
- The service area written out in the words people use for their own town, because the first thing they check is whether you come to them.
- Photographs of finished work. A gallery of your own jobs does more than any paragraph describing them.
- A quote form that asks the three or four things you need to price the job, rather than fifteen fields that get abandoned.
- Licence, insurance and any trade body, stated plainly. These are the things people wonder about and will not ask.
- Whether you take emergency calls, and what hours. Somebody with water coming through a ceiling is the visitor most likely to ring.
What it does not need
A blog nobody has time to write. A slider on the homepage. A page for every service you have ever performed. The site's job is to get a competent stranger to ring you, and most of what gets sold as "more" is just more to load on a phone with one bar of signal.
What we will ask you for
The towns you cover, the work you actually want more of, your hours, and whatever photos you have on your phone. If the photos are bad, say so and we will work with what there is — a real photo of a real job beats a stock image of somebody else's.
Questions we get asked
- I already get all my work by word of mouth. Why bother?
- Because word of mouth now ends in a search. Somebody is given your name, types it in, and decides from what they find. With no site they find a directory listing with a review from 2019 on it. That is the visit this fixes, more than any new enquiry.
- Can people book a job online?
- They can book an appointment if you already run a booking system — the site links out to it. What we do not do is build a booking system that promises a slot you have not agreed to, because a job nobody can attend is worse than a missed call.
- What if I work alone and cannot answer the phone?
- Then the contact form matters more, and it should say when you come back to people. "I answer messages in the evening" is a better site than one that implies somebody is waiting by the phone.
Tell us the towns, the work and the hours. We will handle the rest of it.