Web design for the trades
7 trades, one brief.
Seven trades, one shared problem: the customer is usually standing in the middle of the thing that broke, holding a phone. Everything on a trades website has to survive that moment — one thumb, bad signal, no patience for a carousel.
The call is the conversion, not the form
Most website advice assumes a considered purchase. The trades often don't get one. A furnace quits, a pipe lets go, a branch comes through the roof, and the homeowner calls the first business that looks like it can actually show up. The form submission that other industries optimize for is, in the trades, frequently the *second*-best outcome, and sometimes a sign the caller gave up looking for a phone number.That changes what a trades site is for. The phone number belongs in the header as a
tel: link on every page, visible without scrolling, on mobile and desktop. Not in a hamburger menu. Not as an image. Not only in the footer. BrightLocal's consumer research found 61% of people are more likely to contact a local business when its site works well on their phone, and the trades skew harder still because the search is usually happening in a stressful moment.The corollary matters just as much: the site has to say what happens when you call. Same-day availability, after-hours coverage, the actual service window. A homeowner at 11pm needs to know whether calling is worth doing, and a page that only says "contact us for more information" answers nothing.Licensing is a conversion element, not a legal footnote
Washington's trades run on credentials, and homeowners here have learned to check them. L&I contractor registration, the bond, the insurance certificate, the specialty electrical or plumbing licence, the manufacturer certifications — these are the things a cautious customer looks for before calling, and most trades sites bury them in a footer or leave them off entirely.Put the licence number where it can be read, name the bond, and say plainly what the insurance covers. This is not decorative trust-signalling. It is the specific information that separates a legitimate operator from the unlicensed competition undercutting your bids, and it costs nothing to display. On the sites I build, the credential block is a real page element with real numbers in it, not a badge graphic.
Service-area structure decides which searches you can win
A trades business almost never serves "Seattle." It serves a drive radius, and the honest edge of that radius matters more than the middle. A Puyallup HVAC company competing for Seattle queries is fighting uphill against businesses ten minutes from the caller; the same company owns South Hill, Sumner, and the Meridian corridor almost by default if the site says so clearly.That means
LocalBusiness and areaServed schema with an accurate city list, service-area pages for the markets you actually cover, and copy that names the corridors and neighborhoods rather than the metro. Proximity is the strongest local-ranking input a service business has, and the fastest way to waste it is to write a site that claims everywhere and specifies nowhere.It also means being honest about the edge. Claiming a service area you won't drive to produces cancelled jobs and bad reviews, which cost more than the extra rankings were ever worth.Seasonality and emergency demand are different problems
Two of these seven trades run on emergency demand, and several run on seasonal demand, and the site structure that serves one does not serve the other.Emergency-led trades — HVAC in a cold snap, plumbing on a burst line, electrical on a dead panel — need speed, phone prominence, and after-hours clarity. Seasonal trades — roofing after a wind event, painting when the rain breaks, flooring during the remodel run-up — need to already be ranking *before* the season turns, because search position is not something you can acquire during a two-week surge.Both arguments end in the same place: the work has to be done in advance. A site that starts ranking in November does nothing for the October storm. This is why I push trades clients to build in their slow season rather than their busy one, which is the opposite of when most of them think to call.
What actually gets built
Every trades site I deliver runs on the same modern, server-rendered stack, which means Core Web Vitals in the 90s and pages that render for a crawler without JavaScript. On top of that, the trades-specific layer:Click-to-call in the header on every page. Service pages split by the job the customer is actually searching for, not by internal department. Credential and licence display as real content. Accurate service-area schema. FAQ content structured so AI assistants can extract a direct answer — the Pinnacle Air Control rebuild went from rank 70 to rank 9 in four months and became ChatGPT's #1 recommendation for "heating repair south hill" in 2026 on exactly that pattern.And real photos. Every one of these trades produces visible before-and-after evidence, and a site built on stock imagery throws away the single most persuasive asset the business already owns.
In this group
The trades pages, trade by trade.
- RoofingStorm-emergency and insurance-claim workflows, built into the brief.
- HVACEmergency click-to-call, service-area schema, FAQ schema built for AI Overview.
- PlumbingMobile-first, 24/7 emergency CTAs, dispatch-software-friendly intake.
- ElectricianLicensing display, EV charger pages, residential and commercial splits.
- FlooringPortfolio-led, with in-home sample and consultation booking.
- PaintingPortfolio depth, color consultation hooks, interior/exterior page split.
- ConstructionProject gallery, financing displays, scope-qualified intake forms.
FAQ
Common questions about trades websites.
Roofing, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, flooring, painting, and general construction. The underlying brief is shared — mobile-first, phone-forward, credential-led, service-area accurate — but each trade gets its own page structure because the buying moment is genuinely different across them.
$2,500 flat for a custom build, one-time, and you own it forever. Hosting and maintenance start at $150/mo. There is no hourly billing and no per-page pricing.
Build in the slow season, launch before the busy one. A new site does not earn Google's trust overnight, so the work has to be done ahead of the demand it's meant to capture. Starting a build during your peak means the site goes live after the surge you wanted it for.
Not for every city — for every market you genuinely compete in. A page for a town you'll actually drive to, with real local detail, earns its place. A thin page naming a city you've never worked in is the doorway-page pattern Google penalizes, and it drags the rest of the site down with it.
Tell me which one you are.
Every build starts at $2,500 flat, and you own it forever. I respond within one business day.