Sacramento, CA
Websites for contractors and trades
A roofing website has a different job from a restaurant website. Someone with a leak is standing in their driveway, on a phone, on a bad connection, and they are going to call whoever answers first.
The only thing your site has to do
Get the phone to ring. Everything else on the page is in service of that, and anything that gets in the way of it is a bug — a slideshow that takes four seconds to appear, a phone number that is a picture instead of a link, a quote form asking eleven questions.
I build trade sites around one action: call now, from any screen, in one tap, without scrolling.
Built for a bad connection
Your customers are not sitting at a desk on office wifi. They are outside, on a phone, sometimes on one bar, often in a hurry. A site that feels instant in your office can take eight seconds in a driveway — and more than half of visitors leave before that finishes.
This is measurable, and it is the first thing I check on any trade site: Google's PageSpeed test runs the page on a simulated mid-range phone over a throttled connection, and shows you frame by frame what the customer actually sees while they wait.
The things trade sites get wrong
The same handful of problems turn up on almost every contractor site I look at. A copyright notice that still says 2019, which reads to a customer as a business that may not exist any more. A phone number that cannot be tapped. No service area listed, so nobody knows if you come out to Elk Grove. Photos straight off a camera at four megabytes each. No structured data, so Google has to guess what the business even is.
None of these are matters of taste. They are all checkable, and all fixable.
What's included
- Sticky tap-to-call bar that follows the customer down the page
- A quote form short enough that people finish it
- Service area spelled out, so nobody has to guess whether you come to their town
- Before-and-after photos, compressed properly so they load on a phone
- Licence and insurance details where customers look for them
- LocalBusiness structured data with your trade, area, and phone
Pricing
Every project gets its own fixed quote, in writing, before any work starts. These are the usual starting points.
Sit
One page, custom designed, built to get the phone ringing
Fetch
Five pages, a page per service, built in about two weeks
Best in Show
Ten or more pages, with a shop, bookings or integrations
Common questions
I already get all my work from word of mouth. Why do I need a website?
Because word of mouth ends at a search. Someone recommends you, the customer looks you up, and what they find decides whether they call. If that search turns up nothing, or turns up a site that looks abandoned, the referral you earned goes to whoever looks more real.
My site loads fine on my phone. Is it really slow?
It might well be fine on your phone, sitting on wifi, with the site already cached from the last time you looked at it. The test that matters is Google's, on a simulated mid-range phone over a throttled connection, from cold. That is a different number, and it is the one your customers experience. I am happy to run it for you and show you the frames.
Do you do the Google Business Profile side of it too?
I will set it up properly and connect it to the site, yes — categories, service area, photos, and the structured data on your end so Google can match the two. Reviews have to come from your customers; nobody can honestly promise you those.
What does it cost?
It depends on how many pages you need and what the site has to do, so every project gets a fixed quote in writing before work starts. There are three usual starting points: Sit, Fetch, Best in Show. Most trade businesses want the middle tier.
Send me your site and I will tell you what is wrong with it
No charge, no obligation, and no sales call required to hear the answer. I will run Google's tests against it and send you what they say — including, if it applies, that your site is fine and you do not need me.