What a site that brings work in looks like
A good-looking website and a website that brings work in are not the same thing, and the first does not lead to the second.
What decides it is mostly unglamorous: whether the phone number is visible, whether the page says where you work, whether the form arrives.
The four-second test
Open your front page on a phone and do not scroll. In what you can see, can a stranger answer three questions: what do you do, do you cover me, and how do I reach you?
If any of the three needs a scroll, that is the first thing to fix, and it is worth more than everything below.
The seven things
- A phone number that is always visible, and tappable on a phone. Not in an image.
- The area you cover, in words people use. Not 'the Midlands' — the towns.
- Photographs of your own work, ideally before and after.
- Some indication of price. A from, a range, a recent job. Anything but silence.
- A short form. Name, phone, a line about the job. Every extra field loses people, and asking for a postcode before they trust you loses a lot of them.
- Something that proves you exist — a face, a van, a trading address, reviews.
- Speed. Four seconds on mobile data and most people have gone.
The form is where most sites quietly fail
Test yours. Fill it in as a customer would, from a phone, and check the message actually arrives — not into a spam folder, not into an inbox nobody opens.
Two more things worth doing: make sure a phone number on its own is enough to submit it, because plenty of people will not give an email address; and make the page after submitting say what happens next and when.
I have seen sites that had been silently swallowing enquiries for months. The owner thought the site did not work. It worked perfectly and nobody was reading the inbox.
What matters less than people think
- Animation and clever design. Nobody has ever booked a plumber because of a nice transition.
- How many pages. Three good ones beat twelve thin ones.
- A logo. Worth having, worth about ten minutes of anybody’s attention.
- Being on every social network. One you keep up beats four you abandoned.
The one-question check
Show your front page to someone who does not know what you do — a friend, your partner, anybody. Give them ten seconds, take it away, and ask what the business does and whether they would know how to get hold of you.
You will learn more from that than from any analytics dashboard.
Common questions
How many enquiries should a site bring in?
Nobody can tell you before it exists, and anyone quoting a number is guessing. What is worth measuring is the change: how many people rang you in the three months before and the three months after, and whether the jobs were the ones you wanted.
Should I put a live chat on it?
Only if somebody will answer it. A chat box nobody is behind is worse than none — it promises an instant reply and then does not give one. For most trades a visible phone number does the same job better.
Do I need a contact form if my number is on there?
Yes. A fair number of people will not ring a stranger, particularly outside working hours, and a form catches them. Have both and let people pick.
How do I know whether it’s working?
Ask every caller where they found you and write it down for a couple of months. It is low-tech and it tells you more than any dashboard, because it also tells you which jobs came from where.
Want to see what yours would look like?
Send me a few lines about your firm and within a few days you will have a mock-up of your site, with a price on it. Free.
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