Websites for trade businesses

What this service is

A complete website for a trade business: electricians, plumbers, gasfitters, drainlayers, roofers, painters, plasterers, landscapers, fencers and similar. It is the same size and starting price as our other full builds, eight to fifteen pages from NZD 6,800, plus GST where applicable.

A trade site differs from a builder site in rhythm rather than size. A builder may take on a few large jobs a year. A trade business may handle small jobs every week, some planned, some urgent, and the site has to sort those enquiries before they reach your phone.

Services listed the way customers describe them

Describe services the way a customer would describe the job, not by the name of a qualification: hot water cylinder replacement rather than plumbing solutions, switchboard upgrades rather than electrical services. Each main service gets its own page, or a section on a shared page if there is not enough to say about it.

For each one, the page answers four questions:

• what the job involves and roughly how it is priced, whether by quote, by the hour or a set call-out
• what the customer should have ready, such as photos, the age of the appliance or access details
• whether the work needs a certificate, consent or a licensed tradesperson, linked to the official source
• how to ask for it, and how soon someone will reply

Coverage stated once, accurately

If you go to the customer rather than the customer coming to you, Google treats you as a service-area business. Google's Business Profile guidelines ask service-area businesses to hide their home or yard address from customers and say a service area should not reach further than about two hours' drive from where the business is based, with some exceptions.

Your website should match that. We write a single, clear coverage statement, list the towns and districts you serve, and keep it the same on the contact page, the footer and your Business Profile. If you serve a wide region, separate area pages only make sense where you have something different to say about each place, which the service area pages service covers.

A note on structured data: Google's LocalBusiness markup lists an address as a required property. If you do not publish an address, we do not invent one; we use the parts of structured data that still apply and keep your Business Profile as the main place for location details.

Urgent and planned work kept apart

If you take urgent calls, the site makes the phone number easy to tap on every page and says plainly which hours it is answered. Planned work goes through the quote request form, which asks enough to price the job without demanding information you do not need. Mixing the two, for example a long form for a burst pipe, frustrates people who need help now.

On a phone, the call button and the form controls are at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels with space around them, the minimum in WCAG 2.2, and our own buttons are larger than that.

What is included

• a site plan built around your services and coverage
• service pages or sections for up to six main services
• a coverage statement repeated consistently across the site
• tap-to-call on phones and a short quote request form for planned jobs
• an enquiry notice that tells people what happens to their details, as the Privacy Act information principles expect
• a small gallery of recent jobs, with permission from the property owners
• page titles, descriptions, structured data and a sitemap
• phone and keyboard testing, then a written handover

Details to have ready

• the services you want enquiries for, in your own words, and any you would rather turn away
• the area you cover and how far you will travel for different job sizes
• whether you take urgent work, and when the phone is answered
• photos of recent jobs, with the property owners' agreement where the photos show their home

Not part of a trade build

No call answering, booking software or job management systems. If you already use a booking tool, we can link to it or place its form on a page, quoted separately. Hosting, domains and photography are not included.