Web design for builders and home improvement firms, from £395
Your customer is about to spend a large chunk of their savings on their own home, with a firm they found on the internet, having been warned about builders their entire life.
We build sites that answer that fear in checkable ways: finished work with the story attached, insurance in numbers, a clear process, and customers who said it went fine. We already build for a home improvements firm.
Your customer has been warned about builders since childhood
Every other trade sells to somebody with a small problem. You sell to somebody about to spend a large chunk of their savings, on their own home, with a firm they found on the internet, having been told their whole life that builders take the money and disappear. That fear is the single biggest thing standing between you and the job, and it is not unreasonable of them.
So a builder's website has a different job from most. It is not there to be pretty. It is there to be reassuring in specific, checkable ways: finished work with the story attached, insurance stated with a cover level, a name and a face, a process that tells them what happens in what order, and customers who have said out loud that it went fine.
The builders who struggle online are almost never the ones doing bad work. They are the ones whose evidence lives on a phone, whose last Facebook post is from spring, and whose website was built by a cousin in 2019 and does not work properly on a phone, which is where every single one of these people is looking.
What actually goes on a builder's website
The six things that move somebody from browsing to ringing you.
A page per real service
Extensions, loft conversions, bathrooms, roofing, renovations. Separate pages, written separately, because the customers are not the same person.
Finished work with the story
Before, after, and two sentences about what was wrong and what you did. The sentences are what turn a photo into proof.
Insurance and schemes, named
Cover level in numbers, schemes with registration numbers. Specific and checkable beats a wall of logos.
What happens, in order
Survey, quote, start date, who is on site, how long, how you handle changes. Most fear is fear of the unknown, and this removes it.
Customers in their own words
Real reviews, unedited, ideally next to the job they are about. We never print an average score and we never invent one.
An enquiry that arrives useful
Property type, what they want, rough timescale, whether they have drawings. You stop quoting blind and start quoting from information.
Shakeshaft and Jones Home Improvements
We build for a home improvements firm already, so this page is not guesswork.
Shakeshaft and Jones
Live at shakeshaftjones.co.uk, built by us and carrying our footer link. It is a heavily image-led site, which for a building firm is the point, so the whole thing is served through modern responsive images rather than full-size photographs scaled down in the browser.
That is not a technical boast. It is the difference between a customer on a phone seeing your finished kitchen and seeing a grey box. Read the case study, or look at everything we have live.
Being the builder who comes up, not the builder who is remembered
Most building work is searched for locally and specifically. Not builder, but loft conversion plus a town, or single storey extension plus a town, or flat roof repair plus a town. Those are the searches worth winning, and you win them with a real page about that job in that area, not with the word builder repeated across a homepage.
The other half of it is your Google Business Profile, which for a local building firm is often doing more work than the website is. We set that up properly as part of a build, with the right categories, the service areas you actually cover, and your finished work loaded onto it, because a profile with photographs outperforms one without by a distance.
What we will not do is build you thirty near-identical town pages. It does not work any more, and it makes a good firm look like a spam operation.
See your site before you spend anything
Send us the firm name and a handful of photos of finished jobs. Within 48 hours you get a link to a real working site built for your business. If it is not right, say so and that is the end of it, no cost and no chase.
A site with your core services, your work and a proper enquiry form is £395. £650 buys the bigger version with a page per service and more depth. £1,200 is for a firm that needs something closer to a system than a site. You own it either way.
Care plans start at £45 a month and are entirely optional, with no minimum term. If you would rather add your own photos after every job, we will show you how and leave you to it.
What builders ask us
All my work is word of mouth. What would a website change?
Two things. First, word of mouth already sends people to Google. When somebody is told about you at the school gate, the next thing they do is search your name, and what they find decides whether the recommendation survives. If the answer is a Facebook page last posted on in March, you have lost some of the value of a recommendation you already earned. Second, word of mouth has a ceiling and a lag. It brings you the jobs your existing customers happen to talk about, in the areas they happen to live. A site lets you go and get the kind of job you actually want more of.
How many photos of finished work do I need?
Fewer than you think, but better. Twelve jobs shot properly, each with a before, an after and two sentences about what the problem was, will out-sell ninety phone snaps in a grid. The two sentences matter as much as the picture. A customer looking at a finished extension cannot tell whether it was hard. Telling them the original roof line was wrong and what you did about it is what turns a photo into evidence of competence.
Should the site say what a job costs?
Not a price list, no. But a silent site is its own problem, because the visitor assumes the worst and leaves. What works for builders is a ballpark with the honest caveat attached: what a single storey rear extension has typically run to in your area recently, and the three things that move it the most. You are not quoting. You are showing you know the numbers, which is what somebody wants from a builder before they let you on site.
I do extensions, bathrooms, roofing and small repairs. Does that all go on one page?
No, and this is the most common structural mistake on a builder's site. A person searching for a loft conversion and a person searching for a leaking flat roof are in different states of mind with different budgets and different timescales. One page trying to be both is convincing to neither. Each substantial service gets its own page, written for the person who wants that one thing, with its own photos and its own questions answered.
What about accreditations and insurance?
They go high on the page, in words, with numbers where numbers exist. Public liability cover level, any scheme you are actually registered with, and the registration number. The reason to be strict about this is that a lot of builders' sites carry logos the firm is not entitled to use, which means the ones who are entitled get less credit than they should. Naming the scheme and the number is what separates you from that.
Towns with a page of their own
We are a Southampton studio and we work wherever the job is. These towns have a page of their own on what the local market looks like and who you are up against.
Other trades, and four plain guides
Each trade has a page of its own. The guides cover what a site costs, how a directory listing compares, your Google listing, and paying in parts.
Get your free preview
Your name, your business and a way to reach you. We build a real preview of your site inside 48 hours, and you see it before you pay anything.
Got it, thank you.
We will reply within 24 hours and your preview follows inside 48.
See your builder's site before you pay for it
Send a few photos of finished jobs and we build a real preview in 48 hours. Builds from £395, care plans from £45 a month, no minimum term. Don't like it and you owe nothing.