Do you need a website?

Maybe not. Here is how to tell, from someone who’d rather not sell you one you won’t use.

Someone looks you up between hearing your name and calling you

They’re not trying to find you. They already have your name, from a neighbour, off the side of a van, out of a Facebook group. They type it into a phone to check you’re real before they dial.

What comes back is either something you wrote or something you didn’t.

What comes back when you have no site

Your Google listing, with hours somebody else suggested an edit to. Photos customers took of your parking lot. A Facebook page you last posted to in 2019. Three review sites that scraped your phone number, one of them wrong. A competitor, because they bought your name as a search term.

All of it is about you. None of it is yours.

A website won’t make your phone ring

I want to be straight about this, because someone has probably promised you the opposite and charged you for it.

A website doesn’t go out and find anybody. It catches people already looking for you, and it answers what they would otherwise have to ask you. If your problem is that nobody has heard of you, a website isn’t the fix, and you should spend that money somewhere else.

What it is actually good for

Closing the gap between hearing your name and calling you. That gap is where people give up and call the next name on the list.

Answering the five questions you answer by phone every day. Are you open. Do you come out this far. What does it cost to look. Do you do that kind of job. Where do I park.

Saying what doesn’t fit on a Google listing. What you won’t do. What a callout costs. That you turn up when you say you will, and what happens when you can’t.

Being one place you control when something changes. Your hours over a holiday, a price, a new van, a member of staff who left.

If you are already fully booked

Then a website isn’t for more work. It’s for better work.

People who read what you do and what you charge before they call are people you spend less time saying no to. A page that says “I don’t do new construction” is a page that stops three calls a week you didn’t want.

When you should not buy this

You’re not a prospect if:

• Every job you get comes from one contract, one builder, or one family, and a stranger has never called you.
• You already have a site that is current, and you can change it yourself without putting it off.
• Your whole business lives inside a platform your customers are already on, and your listing there is the thing they book through.

Any of those, keep your money. I’d rather you did.

If you decide you do want one

I build it, then I keep it current. You send a change and it is done within about two business days. You choose whether I publish it and tell you after, or show you a preview first and wait for your OK. $250 a month, no build fee, six months minimum.

You don’t have to decide now. Ask about your site and I’ll tell you whether it fits, or that it doesn’t.