Web design for gardeners and lawn care, from £395

Most websites for garden businesses are built like a landscaper's: big photographs of finished patios and a contact form. That is the wrong shape for someone who cuts grass, trims hedges and keeps borders tidy on a fortnightly round.

The person looking for a gardener is usually one of three people. An older homeowner who can no longer manage the garden and wants the same reliable face each time. A busy household that wants the lawn done without thinking about it. Or a landlord, agent or small business that needs grounds kept presentable and an invoice at the end of the month. None of them is buying a transformation. They are buying turning up.

So a gardener's website has a different job. It has to show which days you are in which area, what a regular visit includes, what it roughly costs, and that you are someone a person can comfortably leave the back gate unlocked for.

People search "gardener" or "garden maintenance" or "lawn mowing" with the name of their town or their part of it. They expect someone local, and they are right to: nobody wants to pay for a gardener's travelling time. That makes the list of places on your site the most useful thing on it for search, provided each place is somewhere you would take a customer on.

Lawn care is its own set of searches. Scarifying, aeration, lawn treatment, moss in lawn, returfing. If you offer a treatment programme, a page that explains what happens in each season will be found by people who have looked at a patchy lawn and gone to find out why. That is a customer who has already decided to pay somebody.

On the map, your Google Business Profile does most of the work. We make the site and the profile agree on your name, number, services and area. We do not promise where you will appear, because nobody honestly can.

Maintenance does not produce dramatic pictures, and it does not need to. What works is ordinary gardens looking cared for: striped lawns, clean edges, a hedge with a level top, a border after weeding. Take them in decent light, from the same spot if you can, and a season of visits becomes a gallery.

The one dramatic picture a gardener does have is the clearance. An overgrown garden before, the same garden after a day's work. Two or three of those pairs near the top of the one-off jobs section will bring in more clearance work than any description.

If you are not sure what you have is good enough, send it anyway. We would rather pick six honest photographs of your own work than use a stock picture of a lawn you have never cut, and we do not use stock for that.

Give us the name you trade under and the area you cover. In 48 hours we send you a link to a real page for your gardening business. If you look at it and decide against, nothing is owed.

For most gardeners a one-page site at £395 is the right size: regular visits, one-off jobs, the round and a way to get in touch. A full site at £650 suits a business with a lawn treatment programme, commercial grounds work or several services that each deserve a page. Builds with custom functionality start at £1,200. Whichever it is, the build can be paid in three parts within twelve months at the same price.

Care plans start at £45 a month, there is no minimum term, and you do not have to take one.