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What I build
Five kinds of business, and the five different sites they actually need. A restaurant and a roofer do not need the same page, and building them the same way is how you end up with a website nobody uses.
Restaurants and food trucks
Somebody is standing in your parking lot with one bar of signal deciding whether to come in. That is the entire job of a restaurant website, and most of them fail it.
On the page
- The full menu as text, not a photo of a PDF nobody can read on a phone
- Today’s hours, and the holiday hours that catch people out
- Address that opens directly in Maps, and a tap to call button
- Your ordering link, whichever service you already use
- Photos of the food, sized so the page still loads fast
Left off on purpose
- A slideshow across the top that delays everything behind it
- A menu locked inside a PDF download
- A pop up asking for an email before anyone has seen the food
- Music
Salons and barbers
Your customers are not reading. They want to know what it costs, who does it, and how to get in the chair. Everything else is decoration.
On the page
- Service list with real prices, or a real range, not "call for pricing"
- Your booking link as the biggest button on the page
- Your stylists, with what each of them actually specialises in
- Work you have done, sized to load on a phone on mobile data
- Parking, which sounds trivial and is the question you get most
Left off on purpose
- Stock photos of somebody else’s salon
- A contact form where the booking button should be
- A price list so vague it makes people phone to find out
Photographers and creatives
The work has to be the first thing and the biggest thing. If somebody has to scroll past your story to see a photograph, the site is built backwards.
On the page
- Your strongest work at the top, at full width, loading quickly
- What you shoot and what you charge, or a starting figure
- An enquiry form that asks the three things you need to quote
- Images compressed properly, so a gallery does not take a minute
Left off on purpose
- An intro animation between the visitor and the photographs
- Right click blocking, which stops nobody and annoys everybody
- Two hundred images when twenty of your best would do more
Trades and services
Contractors, HVAC, electricians, plumbers, landscapers. The visitor has a problem right now and is deciding whether you are real. Prove it above the fold.
On the page
- What you do, in the words people actually search for
- The towns you cover, named, because "the DMV area" is not an answer
- A quote form short enough that somebody finishes it one handed
- Before and after photos of your own jobs
- Licence and insurance details, stated plainly
Left off on purpose
- A gallery of stock photos of tools
- A twelve field quote form that gets abandoned at field four
- Service area listed as a county nobody thinks of themselves as living in
Site fixes and webmaster work
You already have a website. Somebody built it, then left, and now nothing on it has changed in two years. This is the other half of what I do and it does not require a rebuild.
What that covers
- Redesigns and refreshes of a site that still basically works
- Content updates, new prices, new hours, new staff
- Google Business Profile rebuilds, which is often the bigger win
- Page speed fixes, usually images nobody ever compressed
- Ongoing monthly webmaster service so it stops going stale
You do not need a new site to hire me
Monthly webmaster service is sold on its own at $300 a month, on whatever site you already have. No build required and no prior work with me required. It is on the pricing page in full.
Not on the list
Different kind of business? Ask.
The five above are what I see most across Chantilly, Centreville, Fairfax, Loudoun, Reston, Herndon and Vienna. They are not a restriction. Dentists, auto repair, wedding planners, retail, gyms, a trading community with four hundred members: if it needs a page that does one job well, the process is the same and so is the price.
Next
Three sites you can open and scroll