There are many trades people who can benefit massively from a good quality website which also has a great design and solid web marketing behind it backing it up. Sadly, not all designers are doing the trades justice, with sloppy looking sites, poor structure and blurry images which drag down public perception of their skills.

In addition to this, the web designs are often so poor that getting new clients through them is virtually impossible, with potential customer just clicking the back button on their browser without actually trying to read anything. Many such web sites aren’t even mobile responsive – shocking given that most internet surfers now use their smart phones and tablets to browse the web or look for services.

Trades (such as plumbing) website design does not have to be expensive.

Many websites have incredibly complex functionality and security built into them. This might include payments processing via credit or debit cards, extreme security and encryption, membership options, forum and news sections and even some social media type activity.

A typical trades person website does not need any of this, so whilst a high specification business website may cost £20,000 – a typical plumbing or electrician website should only cost in the region of £200 max with a few pounds per month hosting fees at most.

However, for some reason a lot of web design companies are still charging £800 plus for simple 5 or 10 page websites. These kinds of implementations typically only take around 2 days to build. This is because the vast majority are built on templates which exist from earlier and already completed jobs. The only things which need changing are the pictures and descriptions – they layout remains largely the same.

A good example of a plumbing website can be seen on this plumbers page and the costs for what they provide are well within the bounds of reasonable and honest at £199.99 – there are additional features you can buy, but these are optional and the site will function just as smoothly whether you need these or not.

Marketing and SEO

There are many factors which determine whether or not a site is a success. Surely one of these is “how many clients does it get in”? Well before a domain can drive clients, it has to be found by these people. One of the ways a small business such as a sole trader plumber, electrician, taxi driver, plasterer etc. can be found is through the search engine Google. We say Google because they power the highest number of searches online – far more than all of the other search engines like Bing or Yahoo does.

If the design incorporates SEO into its template, and by virtue of careful planning in its text and image content as well, then it stands a good chance of being seen by potential clients.

There are other methods to apply which can help a trade site rank higher in the search engine results page (SERP). The primary component though is to first identify keywords which the company should target.

There is very little point in a plumber wanting to rank for the word “plumber”. People all over the country will be entering that word and its search volume will be astronomical. The competition level is far too hard. Instead, a plumber may want to target a search term such as “plumber in <location>” - where location is the town or county where they provide plumbing services.

These kinds of searches will yield a higher click to conversion ratio, be less costly to target and therefore give a far better ROI (return on investment). Bear in mind though, that marketing IS an ongoing process and you should genuinely expect to pay a premium for the service of getting you customers. It often entails the marketer to sit for months on end working on getting your site seen – it simply does not happen overnight and if it was an easy task then everyone would be doing it.

Hosting your trade website

Back in the year 1998 companies could expect to pay hundreds of pounds per month in hosting and administration fees. Times have changed and prices have fallen dramatically as internet technology availability has outstripped demand. In todays market you should – as a trader – expect to pay NO MORE than £10 a month for your hosting. Anything over this should be looked into with scrutiny, as we have many clients with websites running 24/7 who need zero support throughout the year and are perfectly happy with their sites. We charge £3.99 a month. For this, our customers get upgrades when available, traffic monitoring, advice and uptime of 99.99% and we have never had any complaints at all. So you can see – at more than double the price – anything over £10 is questionable unless some specified service is being provided and can be justified.

We hope this helps traders find their ideal web design team – and even better – save them a lot of money in the process!