Websites for builders and trades in Warwickshire

Most trade businesses I speak to are in roughly the same spot. Work's coming in from word of mouth, there's a Facebook page that gets updated when someone remembers, and there's a nagging feeling that the bigger jobs are going to firms that look more established online. Usually that feeling is right.

Here's what a trade website actually needs to do, based on the ones I've built for builders, contractors and inspection firms around Warwickshire.

It has three jobs, and none of them are winning design awards

• Prove you're real. Someone got your name from a mate and is checking you exist before they ring.
• Show the work. Not a description of the work. The actual work, photographed.
• Make contact effortless. Phone number visible without scrolling, on a phone, one thumb.

That's it. Everything else is decoration. A site that does those three things well will beat a bigger, prettier one that buries the phone number in a footer.

Photos of your own work beat everything else

This is the single biggest difference between trade sites that bring in enquiries and ones that don't. A gallery of ten real jobs, taken on your phone in decent daylight, will do more than any amount of clever design. Stock photos of a generic building site are worse than no photos at all, because people can spot them and it makes them wonder what else isn't real.

Take before and afters. Take the messy middle. Take the finished job with the customer's permission. Build the habit on site and you'll never be short of content.

Cover the right towns, not the whole county

'Builder in Warwickshire' is a search almost nobody does. 'Extension builder Rugby' and 'loft conversion Leamington' are searches people do every day, usually with money ready. If your site claims the whole county and names no towns, you'll lose to the firm that named them. Name the places you actually work: Rugby, Leamington Spa, Nuneaton, and give each one a reason to exist on the site.

Be honest about your radius too. Listing twenty towns you wouldn't actually drive to wastes everyone's time and it shows.

Four pages is usually plenty

• Home. What you do, where, and how to reach you.
• What we do. Your services, in the words customers use, not trade terms.
• Recent work. The gallery. The page that does the selling.
• Contact. Phone, email, area covered, rough response time.

Add an about page if you've got a story worth telling, a family firm going back decades or a particular specialism. Skip it if you haven't. Nobody's ever chosen a builder because of a mission statement. If you want to see how a build like that comes together, the web design process is written out step by step.

The things that quietly cost trades work

• No phone number on the mobile view without scrolling. Most of your visitors are on a phone and half of them want to ring, not fill in a form.
• A contact form as the only route in. Plenty of people won't use one.
• A site that takes six seconds to load on 4G at the side of a road.
• Certifications and memberships not shown. If you're Gas Safe, NICEIC, FMB or CHAS registered, that logo is doing real work for you.
• No indication of price at all. You don't need a price list, but 'most kitchens we do land between X and Y' filters out the timewasters before they reach your phone.

What it costs

For a trade business a proper site is usually £600 to £1,500, and the running costs are somewhere between £100 and £600 a year. I've broken the numbers down properly elsewhere if you want the detail, and my own prices are on the pricing page.

Whatever you spend, judge it on one thing: does the phone ring more? For most trades, one decent job off the back of the site covers the whole build. Everything after that is profit. If it never brings in a single enquiry, it doesn't matter how good it looks.

What one looks like in practice

Middlemarch Construction is a Warwickshire construction firm going back to 1993. Thirty years of work, and a site that needed to say so without any marketing waffle. Services, real project photography, and a quote enquiry route that doesn't make anyone work for it. That's the pattern most trade businesses need.

If you run a trade business in Warwickshire and you're wondering whether it's worth doing, give me a ring on 07516 124501 or drop me a message. I live in Rugby, I'll come and look at what you do, and if I think you'd be better off sorting your Google listing out first I'll tell you that instead.