Two years ago my toolbox was all drills, jigsaws and silicone. Then PetDoorFix, our fitting team in Dubai, launched its website, someone had to look after it, and it turned out to be the person who asks the customers the most questions: me.
I don't come from tech. Everything I know about websites I learned because a customer couldn't find a price, or a page loaded slowly on a phone in 45-degree heat. A few things that stuck:
Your customers are on phones, outside, in a hurry. Almost everyone who books us finds us on a phone — usually standing in their garden looking at a sliding door. If the price and the WhatsApp button aren't visible in the first screen, we've lost them. Our most-visited page isn't the homepage; it's the one about sliding-door inserts because that's the actual problem people have.
Write the price down. Trades websites love hiding prices behind 'request a quote'. We put 'cat flaps from AED 1,500, dog doors from AED 1,700' right on the service pages — the cat flap installation page gets shared in WhatsApp family groups precisely because the number is on it. Same story on the city pages: Dubai dog doors, Abu Dhabi cat flaps and Abu Dhabi dog doors all carry their prices up top. Enquiries went up, not down.
Every page should answer the question the person actually typed. People don't search 'pet solutions'. They search 'can you cut a hole in tempered glass' (you can't — the flap goes in a brand-new factory-tempered panel, which is half of what I explain on jobs). Pages that answer one real question earn their keep.
Fast beats fancy. I removed a heavy slider from our homepage and the calls from that page picked up within weeks. A villa garden in Dubai is not the place for a 6 MB hero video.
I'm still a fitter first — most of my week is measuring panels and teaching cats to use a microchip flap. But the website has become the second toolbox. If you're a tradesperson who's accidentally become your company's web person too, I'd genuinely love to hear what you learned first. I probably need it.
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