Website design for builders

What the customer is actually afraid of

Not that the work will be poor. That it will be abandoned. Everyone considering an extension has heard the story — the builder who took the deposit and vanished, the job that ran eight months over, the final bill that arrived twice the size of the quote.

So the decision is not really about design. It is about risk, and it gets made on four things: finished work that looks like what they want, evidence that other people got through it intact, clarity about money, and honesty about when you could actually start.

Most builders’ websites offer a gallery of eleven photographs and the words “no job too small”. That is not an argument against any of those fears.

What we build for builders

• Project case studies, not a gallery. The difference is everything. A gallery is pretty; a case study is persuasive. Each project gets the brief, the scope, what it cost as a range, how long it took, the problems that came up and how they were handled, and photographs from before, during and after. Three proper case studies beat forty loose photos.
• A page per type of work. Single-storey extensions, double-storey, loft conversions, garage conversions, full renovations, kitchen extensions, new builds, listed and period work, groundworks. Loft conversion [town] is the search and your homepage will never win it.
• Money, addressed directly. Indicative cost ranges per square metre or per project type, what pushes a job up, and — most importantly — your payment structure. A published schedule of stage payments against completed milestones is the single most reassuring thing a builder can put on a website, and almost none do.
• Your lead time, honestly. If you are booked into next spring, say so. It costs you the enquiries you could not have serviced anyway and it signals that you are in demand. Builders who hide it spend the summer disappointing people.
• Memberships and guarantees shown plainly. Federation of Master Builders, TrustMark, NHBC or an insurance-backed warranty, your public liability cover, whether you hold an FMB-backed guarantee. These are exactly what an anxious buyer is scanning for.
• A qualifying enquiry form. Property type, what they want done, whether they have drawings or planning permission, their rough budget range and their timescale. A builder’s problem is rarely too few enquiries — it is too many that were never going to happen. The form should sort them before you spend an evening on a site visit.
• The team and the yard. Real photographs of real people, your vehicles, your actual site set-up. It says you are a firm rather than a phone number.
• Correct GeneralContractor schema, with services, area and hours.

Planning and regulations: the content nobody writes

Homeowners thinking about an extension are lost. They do not know whether they need planning permission or whether it falls under permitted development, they have never heard of a party wall agreement, and they assume building regulations and planning are the same thing.

They search for all of it, constantly, and most of what they find is either a council PDF or a national lead-generation site that will sell their details to four builders. A local builder who explains it in plain English occupies that ground almost unopposed:

• Do I need planning permission for a single-storey rear extension? — and what permitted development actually allows.
• What is a party wall agreement and when do I need one?
• Planning permission and building regulations — what is the difference?
• Do I need an architect, or can a builder work from a surveyor’s drawings?
• How long does a loft conversion take, start to finish?
• When does renovation work qualify for the reduced rate of VAT? — empty properties and conversions, where the saving is substantial and almost nobody mentions it.

These pages bring in enquiries from people months before they are ready to build, which is exactly when a builder wants to meet them.

Where the work comes from

Recommendation, mostly, and that is not a reason to skip a website — it is the main reason to have one. Someone passes your name on, the other person looks you up that evening, and whatever they find is what the recommendation becomes. A dead Facebook page undoes a good word.

The second source is architects, surveyors and estate agents, who refer repeatedly if they trust you. They are judging whether you are presentable in front of their own clients, and they look at your site before they put you forward. A page written for them — the sort of projects you take, the scale you are comfortable with, how you handle drawings and site management — is unusual and works.