A Contractor Site That Buries the Phone Number

What this is

A walkthrough of a composite site, assembled from the patterns that recur across small contractor websites, read the way a visitor actually experiences it.

None of the problems below are unusual. Most contractor sites have several of them, and each one is a small tax on the enquiries the site produces.

The site in question is not badly made. It is reasonably designed, loads acceptably, and reads competently, which is what makes the pattern worth examining.

The first screen

A large photograph of a finished kitchen, a heading reading Quality Craftsmanship Since 1998, and a button marked Learn More.

The business name is in the top left. There is no phone number visible.

What a visitor knows after this screen: that somebody does something involving kitchens, well, and has done for a while.

What they do not know: what trade this is, what area it covers, whether it does their kind of work, or how to make contact.

On a phone, where the photograph occupies most of the screen, that is the entire first impression.

The heading problem

Quality Craftsmanship Since 1998 is a claim rather than information, and every competitor makes it.

What it should say is what the business does and where: kitchen and bathroom fitting in the Tri-Cities, or whatever is true.

That is not less impressive. It is the thing somebody searched for, confirmed back to them, which is what tells them they are in the right place.

The since 1998 part is genuinely useful and belongs in a subheading rather than carrying the main line.

Finding the number

The central problem, and it takes three actions.

Open the menu, which on a phone is a hamburger icon. Find Contact among six items. Tap it. Wait for the page. Read the number, which is plain text rather than a link.

Then copy it, or memorise it, and switch to the phone application.

A visitor who arrived ready to call has been given five opportunities to give up, and a proportion take one of them.

The fix is a tappable number in the header of every page, which is a fifteen-minute change and reliably the highest-return one available.

The services page

A list of nine items, each two or three words, each linking to nothing.

Kitchens. Bathrooms. Extensions. Flooring. Tiling. Carpentry. Painting. Plastering. General building.

That list tells somebody the business does everything, which reads as doing nothing in particular.

It also fails to answer the actual question, which is whether they do the specific job the visitor has in mind and roughly what it involves.

Three pages describing three real services, with what they include, what they cost and how long they take, would produce more work than nine words.

The gallery

Forty images, no captions, no context, several visibly from the same job.

A viewer cannot tell what was done, where, over what period, or which parts were this contractor's work.

Two of the images are clearly stock photographs, which a visitor may or may not notice and which undermines the rest if they do.

What would work better: eight jobs, each with three photographs, a sentence saying what was done and roughly what it cost, and a before shot where one exists.

Fewer images with context persuade considerably better than a wall of them without.

The about page

Three paragraphs, in the third person, about commitment to quality and customer satisfaction.

No name. No photograph. No indication of whether this is one person or fifteen.

A customer deciding whether to let somebody into their house for three weeks learns nothing from it.

The version that works names the person, shows their face, says how many people work there, and says something specific about how the business operates.

The contact page

A form with seven fields, all required: name, email, phone, address, postcode, service required, and a message box.

The phone number appears below it as plain text.

Seven required fields for a first enquiry is asking a great deal from somebody who wanted to ask a question.

Name, contact method and message is enough. The rest can be established in the conversation the form is meant to start.

And there is no indication of what happens next: no response time, no confirmation of what to expect.

What is missing entirely

• The service area, which is the most common reason for a wasted enquiry.
• Any indication of price, at any level.
• Insurance and licensing, which customers check.
• Availability, or how far ahead the business is booking.
• Reviews, anywhere on the site.

The first two are the largest omissions. A visitor cannot tell whether this business covers their town or whether it is remotely affordable, and both are decisions they need to make before enquiring.

What the site does well

Worth saying, because a teardown that finds only faults is not an honest reading.

The photography is genuinely good. The finished work looks well made and the images are properly lit and in focus, which is more than many contractor sites manage.

It loads quickly, works on a phone without horizontal scrolling, and the text is readable at a normal size.

The writing is competent and free of errors, and the design is clean rather than cluttered.

Which is the point of the exercise. This is not a bad website. It is a reasonable website that loses enquiries for reasons that have nothing to do with how it looks, and those reasons are all fixable in a day.

A site that looks considerably worse, with a tappable number at the top, will out-perform it every time.

The five changes worth making

1. Tappable number in the header, with hours.
2. A heading saying what and where.
3. Service area, named, on the homepage.
4. Three real service pages instead of nine words.
5. Cut the form to three fields.

None of that is a redesign. It is a day of work on a site that is otherwise perfectly reasonable, and it addresses the reasons people leave rather than how it looks.

The order matters too. The first change alone typically produces more calls than the other four combined, which is why it is worth doing this afternoon rather than as part of a wider project.

The form change specifically is covered in asking for a phone number you will not use.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.