If you want your business in any trade to be a success – and let’s face it, you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t – then it’s time to start paying attention to the art of tradesmen website design. While word of mouth, along with friends and family, can get you so far, eventually those leads may dry up, and these days it’s all about how you market your services online.
A well-designed website can make all the difference, bringing in brand new customers and giving your existing ones somewhere to send their friends when referencing you (as opposed to your business card which they’ve probably already misplaced). There are plenty of different factors involved too, and they all have to line up for things to work. Sure, you can throw darts at the board aimlessly and some might score points, but for real success you need focus.
So what does “good web design for tradesmen” look like exactly? Well, that’s precisely what we’ll be covering in our blog this month, taking you through a pretty extensive list of things to consider so that you’re ready to take the big leap in the world of online marketing for your business.
Why Is Good Web Design Important For Tradespeople?
Think of your website like your shop front – while you don’t have any specific products to sell as someone with a trade, you still want to make a good impression right? Cracked windows, peeling paint and a door with no handle aren’t going to cut it.
These days, almost every adult in the country has a smartphone or tablet, and that’s where they turn when they need tradespeople. Whether you’re a plumber or an electrician, if your customers can’t find you, how do you expect to compete for business? A poorly designed storefront is one thing, but a storefront boarded up without a sign is even worse – you need a website to promote your skills and trade.
Websites for tradespeople allow all the relevant information to be displayed alongside unique branding. That puts you in the spotlight, but it also needs to be well-designed so that people can easily navigate it and get in touch.
That latter element is called “converting”, which is the ultimate aim, but allow us to spell out the reasons to invest in a website so that we’re clear:
- It makes you more visible to customers
- It presents a professional, trustworthy first impression
- It brings you more leads
- It allows people to find you on Google
- It means people can find your business any time of the day or night
- It gives you an edge over any competitor without a website
- It reinforces your brand for consistency
Marketing Objectives For Your Trade Website
Making a website is essential, but so is going into the project with some clear marketing objectives. It’s important to focus and decide what you want to achieve through a website advertising your trade. Let’s pretend you’ve got three darts, which of the following is most important to you?
- Building credibility – This involves using reviews, case studies, accreditations and pointing out any insurance you have to let people know you’re a credible business.
- Shouting about your services – This tells customers all about the different work you can carry out, and they shouldn’t have to hunt for that information on your site.
- Bring in the leads – Desperate for more queries? Then your site needs to drive people to call, fill in a form or request a quote to get you fired up.
- Let people know where you work – Your coverage area might dictate the jobs you can take on, so letting people know where you operate and targeting local areas can help.
- Let people know when you work – Do you offer a 24-hour service for emergencies? Or just standard hours? Let people know and get people to call in the hours of the day that you would like.
If you chose three things, great, but if you want all those things, then that’s ok too. You can set multiple objectives as long as you’re realistic, this just helps to narrow down your focus at the very beginning – there are plenty of possibilities!
What Written Content Do You Need For Your Trade Website?
Having a website to advertise your services is one thing, but now you need to think about what you’re saying and how you say it. The words on your website are not only an effective means of easily communicating with your audience, but it also helps search engines to understand what your website is about, giving it a reason to serve you in results when the right user comes along.
Here are three things your trade website content should do:
- Answers to questions – Sometimes people are searching for a phone number, but sometimes people want answers to their questions online first. Not only does answering common queries online make your site more useful to people, but it also provides a clear trust signal that you’re a skilled professional in your particular area of expertise.
- Target information for your demographic – It’s all about writing for your audience and knowing their situation to make your service relatable. Are they young families short on time? Or older clientele with mobility concerns?
- Convey important messages – Whether it’s specific discounts to entice people or the fact that you have accreditations, your unique selling points and important messages need to take centre stage.
Now you know what to write, how do you go about it? Here are a few tips on writing content for audiences online:
- Keep sentences short and simple. Don’t make people fight to find details or fall asleep trying to scroll through your walls of text.
- Write in an active voice. It sounds weird, but that basically just means you should write in a way that conveys an action is being performed now, instead of in the past.
- Don’t use jargon. No one likes being bamboozled by industry terms if they’re not in that industry, and it’s not what your website is for. Speak in the way your audience might, putting them more at ease.
Good Things To Include On Your Trade Website
Web design for tradesmen is all about giving the user the best experience and getting them to take the action you want. With that in mind, here’s a bucket-load of things that are good for your website to have:
- A contact form and phone number – make it easy for users to get in touch
- Quick navigation – don’t frustrate users with huge menus, keep a structure and flow to navigation
- Reviews and testimonials – create trust with the words of your previous customers
- A gallery – pictures of your work can show that you’re not just all talk
- Mobile responsive design – again, people search on small devices, so your website needs to be designed to respond and reshape to function normally on these screens
- Opening times – let customers know when they can reach you
- A blog page – show customers that you have your finger on the pulse with relevant, regular content
- You process steps – display to your customers just how simple your process is in a few steps
- Social media links – give customers another way to view your business and let them know you run a legitimate operation
- A map of areas you cover – assure customers in your area that you serve them
These ten things are a good place to start, but there is a whole lot more besides this that you can include – if you’re not sure where to begin or what to add, give our team a call today.
Things To Avoid On Your Trade Website
While we’ve given you some tips already on what to include on a trade website, there are plenty of traps people fall into when designing websites. Here are some things to avoid in our ‘tradesmen website design 101’ guidebook:
- Don’t clutter things – keep some white space and make your site easy and sleek to look at
- Don’t use garish colours – again, make it easy to look at; neon colours and garish choices will only turn people off
- Don’t use bad grammar – poor grammar and spelling make you look unprofessional and, at times, incomprehensible, so why would a customer then call you?
- Don’t use dated designs – stay up to date with the latest design trends to avoid looking outdated and slow
- Don’t make false claims – don’t make claims you can’t back up, as they’ll likely come back to bite you
- Don’t steal things from other sites – only use other sites you like as inspiration, stealing someone else’s content will mean you get penalised by search engines
- Don’t leave out the important info – don’t forget to put important stuff above the fold at the top of your site to quickly get the user’s attention
- Don’t leave your site unsecured – not only is an unsecured site at risk to hackers, but it can count against you with consumers and search engines alike
- Don’t leave broken code in place – any broken links will result in poor usability, making a dent in your SEO performance, so stay on top of the health of your website
If that sounds like a lot to take in, that’s because it is. Don’t fall behind the competition, enlist the help of a professional company that specialises in website design for tradesmen. At Leblek, we can also give you ongoing support to keep your site in check and tackle any issues.
Optimisation Tips For Your Trade Website
While your website design should focus on the end user (Mr and Mrs Smith, looking for your skills immediately or in the near future), you also need to make sure it meets the demands of search engines. The list of demands from websites like Google is ever-growing and constantly changing, but here are a few factors that can really count for (or against) you:
- Site speed – people have very little patience these days, so if your website doesn’t load quickly, it will impact your ranking, with Google rating you lower than others
- Semantic markups – this is just a fancy term for using heading tags that target your key terms, but be careful not to stuff your site with keywords as it’ll be viewed as spam
- Useful content – a big thing in the industry right now is giving users engaging and useful content, not just waffle and keywords
- Mobile friendly – we said it before and we’ll say it again, make sure your website works on mobiles as not only will it look weird but it can also impact rankings in search results
- Your bounce rate – all of the items above impact how long users spend on your site and how quickly they leave, but if they leave straight away, that’s called a ‘bounce’ and that’s a bad thing in Google’s eyes
Should You Build Your Own Trade Website?
The short answer to this is, no. Unless you have vast amounts of experience in web design, SEO optimisation and content creation, it’s better to leave things to the professionals if you want a professional-looking result.
The Advantages Of Professional Web Design For Tradespeople
Working with a dedicated tradesmen website design agency means you can focus on running your business day to day, and you won’t be paying through the nose for templates and add-ons that make your site look like every other poorly designed site. At Leblek, we’ll also get to understand you, meaning we can work towards your specific goals and give your users a better idea of who you are and what you do.
You shouldn’t expect results overnight with professional website design, either. We’ve got vast amounts of experience in this sector and that’s what makes us so good at our jobs – from coding skills to UX principles, we take the time to do things right the first time around. The saying that ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’ can be like nails on a chalkboard, but it’s never been truer. Something knocked up overnight will probably break just as quickly without ever performing the way you want it to.
Put your website build in our hands and we’ll make sure you get the very best possible results with economic pricing for a strategic approach. So stop stumbling over templates and convoluted tools and contact us at Leblek today.
