Web design for tradesmen who get looked up before they get rung.

Yes, because a step has been added to the front of every job and none of us agreed to it. Somewhere between deciding to get the work done and picking up the phone, people now look. It happens for a ninety pound callout and it happens for a forty thousand pound job. It happens whether they found you on Google, saw the van on the estate, or were given your name by a colleague they trust completely.

That last one catches most trades out. A recommendation used to travel straight to a phone call. Now it travels to a search bar first, and what turns up either backs up what your customer was told or quietly undercuts it. Nobody rings to tell you they looked and thought better of it. That is the real cost of having nothing, and it is invisible, which is exactly why it goes on for years.

You rent one and you own the other, and everything else follows from that. A profile lives on somebody else's platform, laid out to their template, sitting a few pixels away from four firms doing the same work as you. It is not there to get you chosen. It is there to keep the person on that platform until somebody, anybody, gets chosen. Those are not the same goal, and when they conflict it will not be your interests that win.

The rules can also change without your say so. What a lead costs, who sits above you, which badges are being sold this year, how visible your posts are to people who already followed you. And the reviews, the ones you spent five years earning, one careful job at a time, are held on a system you cannot take with you. Stop paying and the whole lot goes back behind the turnstile.

A site of your own is a different arrangement. Your domain, your pages, your photographs, and one address you can put on a van, a quote, a business card and the side of a skip, knowing it leads somewhere that is entirely about you. None of that means deleting the profiles. It means having somewhere to send people once they are interested, instead of handing them back to a page full of your competitors.

Because the enquiry you just paid for was sold to three or four other people at the same time. That is the model, not a fault in it. The customer fills in one form, several firms are charged for the privilege of answering it, and everybody rings the same person within the hour. They did not choose you. They chose to fill in a form, and you are one of the names it produced.

Which leaves you arguing about the only thing that can still separate four strangers who all turned up at once. There is nothing on that call for anyone to weigh except the number, so the number is what gets weighed, and the firm most willing to cut it takes the job. Do that all year and you have a diary full of the work you wanted least, at the price you wanted least, paid for twice over.

Somebody arriving at your own site got there another way. They have read what you do, seen the jobs, worked out that you cover them, and decided to ring you specifically. The conversation starts from a completely different place, because by then they are not comparing four names. They are checking whether the one they picked can fit them in.

In what the customer is worried about, and in how long they have got to worry about it. Somebody with a burst pipe and somebody planning an extension are doing entirely different things, at entirely different speeds, and a page written to serve one of them will fail the other. That single difference decides the shape of the whole site: what goes at the top, how much reading there is, whether photographs carry the argument or paperwork does, and what a good enquiry even looks like when it arrives.

So the common ground above is where websites for tradesmen start, not where they end. Pick your trade and the argument gets specific.

One trade business so far, and I would rather name it than gesture at a crowd. Marlborough Builders work out of Prescot, three decades in, with a reputation that had never once needed a website to travel. What they had online was rented: an agency template on a monthly fee, quietly doing nothing. Everybody who mattered found them the old way, and everybody else did not find them at all.

The site they have now is theirs outright, and it is shaped around how the firm actually trades rather than around whatever came with the subscription. Darren tells me it brings in three or four enquiries a week and is where most new work now starts. That is his account of his own business, not a forecast for yours. Read the full case study

Essentials is £750, Signature is £1,450, and Bespoke starts from £2,250. You are given one figure at the outset, in writing, and it is still that figure when the site goes live. Nothing gets added along the way, and nothing has to keep being paid afterwards to keep it online.

I work on one or two of these at any given time. That is the whole model, and it is why the work looks the way it does: there is room to sit with what your business genuinely sells, which jobs you want more of and which ones you would rather stop being rung about, then build around those answers instead of dropping your logo into a layout that was finished before we met. And you are dealing with me throughout, from the first conversation to the day it goes live and afterwards, rather than with an account manager relaying your notes to somebody you will never speak to.

You can see exactly what sits in each tier on the pricing page