Plumbing and trades website design

The design brief. A plumbing company site covering domestic work with an emergency call-out service. Trades sites have a particular audience problem: half the visitors are researching a planned job, and half have water coming through a ceiling right now. Those two need entirely different things from the same page.

Photography that shows the work. The hero is a close crop of hands working on corroded pipework with a wrench. Not a smiling stock tradesman, not a van, not a logo. Showing the actual job being done signals competence in a way a posed portrait cannot, and the visible corrosion communicates that this is a firm that deals with real problems rather than a call centre that dispatches subcontractors.

Pricing on the cards. Service tiles for basement, kitchen and bathroom plumbing each carry a starting price. This is the single most commercially significant decision on the page. Almost every trades competitor hides pricing behind an enquiry form, and stating a from-price instead does two things: it filters out enquiries that were never going to convert, and it earns trust from everyone else, because a company willing to publish numbers is assumed to be one that will not invent them later.

Handling the emergency visitor. A separate emergency section sits further down with its own heading and a direct call prompt. A visitor with an urgent leak does not read a services page, so the emergency route is visually distinct rather than folded into the general list.

Booking on every tile. Each service card carries its own book control rather than sending everyone to one contact page. Removing a navigation step between the decision and the action matters most in trades, where the visitor is frequently standing in the affected room holding a phone.

Colour. Deep navy with white and a single accent, kept clean and unfussy. Trades sites often over-decorate to look established; restraint reads as professional and keeps the photography doing the persuading.