Travis Arb

Jess rang me in October. She runs the office at Travis Arb, a tree surgery firm in Rainhill led by James Travis, and she had built their website herself on IONOS. She was the first to say it was not doing them justice, and that the firms they were up against locally looked far more established online than they did.

That gap mattered more than it would for most trades, because Travis Arb is really two businesses. One is the work most people picture: felling, pruning and stump grinding for homeowners across St Helens, Merseyside and Cheshire. The other is utility arboriculture, cutting trees back from overhead power lines for the network operators and their contractors. The team holds the utility tickets for it and is authorised by SP Energy Networks, including for storm response.

A homeowner with an overgrown sycamore and a network operator checking a contractor want completely different things from the same website. The first wants to know it will be done safely, tidily and for a fair price. The second wants to see tickets, insurance and evidence of line clearance work. A site that only speaks to one of them loses the other.

A full rebuild from scratch, 23 pages on their own domain. The homepage opens on a slideshow of the team at work, all of it their own photography, with a pause button for anyone who would rather it stood still. Over it sit two routes, a free quote for homeowners and a link straight to the utility work, with the 24 hour emergency number underneath.

Behind that there is a page for the utility work, a page for every service (removal, pruning, stump grinding, storm and emergency call outs, protected trees and grounds maintenance), a page for each area they cover from St Helens to Cheshire, a gallery of recent jobs and four plain English guides answering the questions people actually search for, such as what tree work costs and whether a tree is protected.

The quote form asks first whether the job is for a home or a network, takes up to three photos, and asks whether the tree is next to a road, because that changes how the job is planned. Every request lands in two inboxes, so nothing waits for one person to be at a desk. For anyone on the move there is a WhatsApp button that opens with a message ready to send a photo.

Tree work is judged on the result, so the photographs had to carry the site. Jess gave me permission to use everything on their Facebook page, and every image on the site is a real job by their own team. Where there was a before and an after, the two sit together: drag across a high voltage line near Northwich and watch the hedgerow fall back from the span, or tap any job in the gallery to see it as it was.

The look follows the work. Deep forest greens from the photos, one sharp lime for anything you can press, and large, plain type that reads at arm's length on a phone in a garden. The logo changes colour as you move down the page, the detail Jess picked out first when she saw the preview.

It was built and launched inside a week of the content being agreed. On launch day I moved the domain over myself, left their email exactly as it was, tested the form live with photos attached, and pointed their Google Business Profile at the new site with a fresh description, tidied services and a WhatsApp chat button.

Two front doors, not one. Burying the utility work under a services menu would have hidden the half of the business that wins contracts. Putting it beside the homeowner quote on the first screen means an operator and a homeowner both find their way in one tap, and the form asks which one you are before anything else.

Only the credentials they actually hold. I asked whether they belonged to any of the contractor schemes commercial clients look for. Apart from James's technician membership of the Arboricultural Association, they do not, by choice. So the site shows that, the utility tickets, the insurance, the waste carrier licence and the first aid training, and not a single logo they have not earned.

Photos welcome, but no quoting from a photo. James asked for this one. A picture helps them understand the job, but a tree has to be seen before it is priced. The contact section now says exactly that, so nobody expects a firm price by return and nobody is surprised on the day.

Grounds maintenance left short on purpose. It is a new line for them, and Jess told me they had no photos of it yet and were still working out how it would run. Writing a confident page about something that does not exist yet would have been easy and wrong. It stays brief until there is something real to show.

Reviews typed out, with dates. Their best feedback was on Facebook. Each quote on the site carries the reviewer's name, where it was left and the month, beside the Google and Facebook totals, so anyone can check it.

Travis Arb now has a site that looks like the firm it is: a team trusted to work beside live power lines, who will also come and take down the tree at the bottom of your garden and leave it tidy.

Launched 20 October 2026, so these describe what the site was built to do rather than figures measured over time.

The biggest lever now is Google reviews. The firms showing in the local map results have far more than Travis Arb, so I made them review cards with a QR code and a short link, to hand over or send the day each job finishes. The full size originals of their photos are replacing the Facebook copies, and the grounds maintenance page grows once there is work to show.