You've decided you want a website for your trade business. Good. Now comes the part nobody explains properly: what should actually be on it, what's a waste of money, and what a fair price looks like.
I build these for a living, from a home office in Largs North, and I've had the same conversation enough times to know where it usually goes wrong. So here's the whole thing, start to finish, in plain English.
If you're still weighing up whether it's worth it at all, start here instead. This one assumes you're past that.
A tradie website is not a brochure. It is not "an online presence". It has exactly one job:
Turn someone who is looking for your trade, right now, into a phone call.
That's it. Every decision below comes back to that. If something on the page doesn't help a stressed person with a leaking pipe decide to ring you in the next thirty seconds, it's decoration.
This matters because the person landing on your site is almost never browsing. They've got a problem. They've opened three tabs. Yours is one of them, and the other two belong to your competitors. You have about five seconds before they decide whether to keep reading or go back to the search results.
The top of the page, before anyone scrolls, has to answer three questions at a glance: what trade, what area, and how do I contact you.
"Bartlett Plumbing. Blocked drains, hot water and general plumbing across the western suburbs of Adelaide. Call 0400 000 000."
That's not fancy copywriting. It's just the three facts, in the one place people look. An enormous number of trade sites open with a stock photo and the word "Welcome", and the visitor has to hunt for what the business even does. Every second of hunting is a second closer to the back button.
Not in the footer. Not on a contact page two clicks away. At the top, on every page, as a link that dials when tapped on a phone.
Most of your visitors are on a phone. Some of them are standing in a flooded laundry. Make the phone number the easiest thing on the screen to hit.
This is the single most skipped thing, and it's the one that does the most work for a local trade.
If you cover Semaphore, Port Adelaide, Largs Bay, Woodville and Henley Beach, say those words on your site. Not "servicing metropolitan Adelaide". The actual suburb names.
Two reasons. People check whether you come to them before they call, and Google needs the words to understand where you work. A page that says "metropolitan Adelaide" and a page that names twenty suburbs are competing for very different searches, and only one of them turns up when someone types "electrician Largs North".
Not stock photos. Yours.
A stock photo of a smiling man in a hard hat tells a visitor nothing except that you bought a stock photo. Six pictures of work you actually finished tells them you can do the thing they need done.
You already have these on your phone. Before and after shots are gold. A tidy job site is worth more than a perfect studio shot, because it says you clean up. If you're not sure which ones are worth using, send me a few and I'll tell you which ones I'd put up.
Screenshot a couple of your Google reviews and put the words on the page. First name and suburb is plenty. "Great job, quick and tidy. Sarah, Woodville."
Three real ones beat thirty vague ones. And if you haven't got any yet, ask your last five customers. Most will say yes and nobody ever does it.
Name, phone, and "what do you need". That's the whole form.
Every extra field costs you enquiries. Address, preferred contact time, how did you hear about us, a dropdown of seventeen service categories: each one is another reason to give up. You can ask the rest when you ring them back.
The form has to land in your inbox immediately, and you have to actually answer it. A form that goes to an address you check on Sundays is worse than no form at all.
A site that takes six seconds to load on a phone with two bars in a driveway has lost. People don't wait, they hit back and try the next result.
This is mostly about how the site is built, which is my problem rather than yours, but it's worth knowing it's a real thing and not a technicality. Why website speed matters goes into what actually makes a site fast.
Just as important, and much cheaper.
Here's the range you'll run into, honestly:
Free website builders. Wix, Squarespace, a Facebook page. Costs you nothing up front and quite a lot of your weekends. You'll get something on screen. Whether it turns up on Google, and whether it converts, is down to you learning a job you didn't ask for.
A local agency. Usually $3,000 to $8,000 up front for a trade site, sometimes more, then a hosting fee. You get a proper build. You also get a payment that hurts, and quite often the site then sits untouched for three years because every change costs money.
Someone overseas, off a marketplace. $300 to $800. Sometimes fine, often a template with your logo dropped in, and usually very hard to get changes made afterwards. Check who owns the domain before you pay anyone, because that catches people out constantly.
What I do. $199 to set up, then $59 a month. The site is designed and built for you, not picked off a template, and the monthly covers hosting, security, changes whenever you need them, and the ongoing work of getting you found on Google.
I'll be straight about why it's structured that way, because it matters: $199 nowhere near covers building a site. The rest is spread across the first year instead of being charged up front, which is why the monthly plans run on a twelve month minimum term and then continue month to month. End it inside that first year and the remaining months of the term become payable. That's in the terms, in writing, before you pay anything. I'd rather say it here than have it be a surprise.
There's a fuller breakdown in how much a website costs in Adelaide if you want the numbers side by side.
About a week to ten days for a typical trade site, most of which is waiting on you for photos and details rather than me building.
The order goes: you tell me about the business, I build a demo site and show you, you tell me what to change, it goes live. You see it before you commit to anything.
One page listing eight services will lose to eight pages, one per service, every time.
If you do blocked drains, hot water, gas fitting and general maintenance, that's four things people search for separately, in different words, with different urgency. A single page trying to rank for all four ranks properly for none of them.
You don't need eight pages on day one. But if you're serious about getting found for the work you actually want, that's the direction, and it's the main reason a trade site keeps getting better over months rather than sitting still. SEO for Adelaide tradies covers how that side works without the jargon.
The other half of it is your Google Business Profile, the panel that shows up on the right of the search results with your reviews and a map. That's free, it's often the first thing a customer sees, and it works far better when it points at a real website that says the same things. Sorting one without the other leaves most of the value on the table.
If you take one thing from all of this: the site that wins the job is the boring one. Trade, suburbs, phone number, real photos, real reviews, a form that takes ten seconds. Done properly and quick to load. That's the whole game.
You can build that yourself with a free tool and enough weekends, and some people do. Or I can build it for you, show you the demo before you pay anything past the setup, and look after it from there.
Either way, don't leave it as a job for next month. The bloke down the road with the ordinary little site is getting the calls you're not.
Want to see what yours would look like? Send me a message and I'll build you a demo. Have a look at what I've built for other trades first if you like.
12 Bar Digital, Largs North, Adelaide, South Australia. (08) 7077 0985. hello@12bardigital.com.au