A tradesman website that shows the work.
The jobs come by phone. That is not a problem to solve, it is the channel, and a tradesman website has one task: to make the customer comfortable enough to make that call. So the site has to show what you actually do, and it has to do it on a phone with two bars of reception.
What a tradesman actually needs
Photographs of your own work. Not illustrations. The only reference that counts in this trade is something you built, photographed where it stands.
A phone number that is the easiest thing on the page. Not behind a form, not behind a menu. A customer with a leak does not fill anything in.
To be found locally. The company name, the place and the trade have to be text the site can be found on, not only a logo.
And a page that loads on a building site. The customer looks at the site while standing outdoors. That is the real test environment, and it is not a 27-inch screen on fibre.
What is hard here in particular
The customer does not know the trade’s words. She does not know whether she needs roofing or sheet metal work. She knows it is dripping above the kitchen window. A service list written in the trade’s vocabulary makes her translate first, and then she calls someone she knows instead.
One person runs everything. Nobody updates the site on a Tuesday. Anything that needs maintenance in order not to become wrong, becomes wrong.
Video is what everyone wants and what damages most. A hero video is the heaviest element a page can carry, and it lands on exactly the customer standing outdoors on mobile data. Then it is not a presentation, it is a barrier.
And photographs from the job are heavy and crooked. Phone pictures straight from the camera roll are large files in the wrong format. They belong in the build step, not in the visitor’s browser.
Letting the customer point rather than read
The hardest of the four has a solution that is not a piece of text.
The customer does not know the trade, but she knows the building. She knows it is the roof, the window, the terrace. Let her point at the part of the house it concerns, and give her the service that belongs to it, and she never had to know the word.
The second move is a rule about what is NOT loaded. A heavy file should not be sent to anyone who did not ask for it: not on a small screen, not in data-saver mode, not on 2G, and not before the element is actually about to come into view. The rule is written once and holds without anyone having to remember it, which is the only kind of maintenance a one-person firm can afford.
The project as evidence
Håvard Weider is a client project. The sentences below are the register’s own, taken from the project list and not rewritten for this page.
Håvard is a carpenter and runs the firm on his own. Jobs came in over the phone, and he had no page showing what he actually does.
I built the site. Two things are worth naming. One is a clickable house: you point at the part of the building the job concerns, and get the service that belongs to it. The other is the hero video, which is fetched only once it is a quarter in view, and never on a small screen, on data saver or on 2G, so an expensive file is not sent to anyone who did not ask for it.
The site is in production on its own domain. It is the only one of the five industry projects on this site that is, and that is why it is said.
The way onward
The scoping call is free, takes twenty minutes, and is about which jobs you want more of. A written quote afterwards.
Book a scoping call