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Web design for trades
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A trade website has one job, and it is not to look like a brochure. It is to turn somebody who has just found you into a quote request, on a phone, in about ninety seconds.
Nobody browses a groundworks website. They arrive with a problem, they want to know whether you do that specific thing, whether you have done it before near them, and how quickly they can get a price. Everything else on the site is decoration, and decoration that gets in the way of those three answers is worse than nothing.
Build it around the jobs, not around your company
The instinct is to start with an about page, a history and a values section. The customer does not care yet. Give each job you want a page of its own, written in the words a customer would use rather than the words the trade uses internally. Somebody types resin driveway, not decorative aggregate installation.
That structure does two things at once. It answers the specific question fast, and it gives you something to rank with, because a page about one job can be genuinely useful about that job in a way a combined services page never is.
Proof beats claims, and photographs are the proof
Every trade website in the country says quality workmanship and competitive prices. None of it is read. What is read is a photograph of a finished car park that looks like the one the reader is standing in, and a review from somebody with a name who had the same job done.
Ten honest photographs of finished work will do more for the enquiry rate than any amount of copywriting, including this sentence.
Take them yourself, on a phone, in daylight, standing far enough back to show the whole job. The temptation to use stock photography is strong when the weather has been bad for a fortnight. Resist it, because customers recognise stock images and it undoes the trust the rest of the page is building.
The quote form is the product
Most of the design decisions that matter happen here. Ask for the fewest fields that let you price the job or decide to call: what the job is, roughly where, and how to reach them. Every extra field costs you enquiries, and the ones it costs you are disproportionately the people in a hurry, who are usually the people ready to buy.
Put the phone number where a thumb can reach it, make it a real tap to call link, and make sure the form tells the sender it worked. A form that silently does nothing is the most expensive bug a trade site can have, and it is invisible from the inside, because nobody complains, they just ring somebody else.
Assume a phone, on site, in the rain
This is a different design constraint from the one most websites are built to. The reader is outdoors, one handed, on a signal that comes and goes, possibly in gloves. That argues for large tap targets, high contrast, short paragraphs and almost no clever interaction. It also argues hard for a page that loads fast, because on a bad connection every extra script is another second of a blank screen.
When to redesign in place instead of starting again
Starting again is the default recommendation from most agencies and it is often wrong. If the current site ranks for anything at all, a rebuild puts that at risk for no gain. We redesigned Smart Surfacing in place for exactly that reason: the pages that were working kept working, and the money went on the parts that were not.
Rebuild when the site cannot be edited without a developer, when it cannot be made fast because of how it was built, or when it sits on a platform that nobody will support. Redesign in place when the bones are fine and the problem is that it looks and reads like it was built in a hurry, which for most trade sites it was.
What to have ready before you brief anyone
- The list of jobs you want more of, in order of what they are worth to you.
- The places you will actually travel to, honestly.
- Photographs of finished work, as many as you can find.
- Three customers who would leave a review if asked.
- Who answers the phone, and what happens to a form at nine on a Sunday.
That last one catches people out. A site that generates enquiries you do not answer for two days is a slower way of losing the work.
The search side of this, including the profile that sits above every website result, is in SEO for tradesmen.
