Website for painters and decorators, where the work does the selling
In January you are cutting in around a bay window with the heating on, and in July you are up a ladder rubbing down render before the rain comes back. The finished work is the best advert you have, and at the moment all of it is in a phone with four thousand other pictures.
The site runs on your own domain, with SSL, hosting and nightly backups in every plan. From €49 to €199 a month, excluding VAT.
The year a decorator actually has
Two seasons, two kinds of work, and a run of quiet weeks in between that nobody puts in a diary.
The week the season turns
One October the outside work stops, near enough overnight, because the first proper cold snap arrives and nobody wants their windows done. The enquiries do not tail off. They just stop.
In March they arrive all at once, and you are booking into June while pricing four exteriors in one evening. Neither half of that is really a workload problem. It is that nobody knew you do interiors too, or that November was wide open.
Measuring up on a Saturday, pricing on a Sunday
You drive to the house, walk the rooms, count the doors, note the ceiling that will want lining, and drive home. That evening a page of scribbles turns into a price, and by the time it is written it is late and it says one figure and a sentence.
The customer has two other prices in front of them. One lists every room. Yours does not, and yours is the one that has to be explained down the phone.
Photographs nobody sees
The hallway in the deep green with white woodwork, the sash windows that took two days, the staircase that came out exactly right. All of it photographed, all of it still on the handset.
Somebody choosing between three decorators wants to look at finished work far more than they want to read about you. At the moment they have to take your word for it.
Three things worth having on a decorator's site
The rest exists, but this is what a quoting trade with a hard season actually leans on.
A price that reads room by room
Hall, stairs and landing on one row. Two bedrooms on another. Woodwork apart from walls, lining paper apart from paint, and the making good on a line of its own.
The customer can see what comes off if they decide to do the back bedroom themselves, and they approve it on its own page rather than replying to an e-mail with the word yes.
Interior in winter, exterior in summer, both up all year
A from-price by the square metre for walls and ceilings. A from-price per room for hanging paper. Quoted for a full exterior, because a rendered semi and a Victorian terrace with sash windows are not the same fortnight of work.
When the season turns you bring the other half of the list to the front, and the site stops advertising render work in December.
Which pages people are reading
How many came, what they looked at, and whether the exterior page goes quiet three weeks before the diary does. No cookie banner, because none of it is pinned to a named person.
It reads more like an early warning than a report. A thin February on the page tends to arrive before a thin March on the ladder.
A decorator's list, split the way you sell it
Names and numbers are yours. What the list has to do is show which work carries a price and which work has to be looked at first.
Two categories, interior and exterior, each with prices of its own, means the same site earns its keep in January and in July.
The things decorators ask before committing
Yes. Pictures sit with the service they belong to, so the render photographs are on the exterior page and the hallway sits beside the price for hall, stairs and landing.
That is what the cost lines are for. Each room, each surface and each coat can be its own row with its own figure, and the customer sees precisely what leaving one out would save them.
No. Exteriors can sit as quoted while the inside work carries a from-price. Somebody can then work out roughly what a bedroom costs without you committing to a figure for a rendered house you have never stood in front of.
Move the categories about. The list, the pictures and the pages are all yours to reorder, so exteriors lead in April and interiors lead in October, and nothing has to be rebuilt to do it.
Yes, once your own Stripe account is connected. Approval and deposit happen together on the quote page, which is a good deal less awkward than raising it on the doorstep.
The plans are €49, €99, €149 and €199 a month, excluding VAT. All of them run your site on a domain you own, with SSL, hosting, nightly backups and support in English.
More trades
- Flooring fittersPriced per floor type and square metre.
- Carpenters and joinersHourly rate and fixed price side by side.
- RoofersThe roof survey as the bookable way in.
- Tilers and bathroom fittersPackage prices per bathroom size, with a start date.
- Balcony glazingMeasure first, a quote that survives a board meeting.
- Groundworks and excavationSite visits booked, machine hours on the quote.
- All trades
Get the decorating on a page
Describe what you take on and the area you cover, or point at your current site, and you get a first version with your services, a quote laid out room by room and somewhere proper for the photographs. Change anything by clicking it.
The site runs on your own domain, with SSL, hosting and nightly backups in every plan. From €49 to €199 a month, excluding VAT.