Not every trade should be sold like a haircut
I build a lot of booking flows and price pickers, and it would be easy to tell you every trade needs one. This one does not, and pretending otherwise would have produced a worse website.
Ashcroft is a commercial electrical contractor. The work is schools, care homes and light industrial units. A job starts with a specification, a site visit, a programme of works and a tender. There is no version of that which begins with a customer choosing a two hour slot on a Tuesday and paying a deposit.
The buyer is different too. It is a facilities manager, a main contractor or a school business manager, and they are not deciding in ninety seconds. They are deciding whether you are a credible outfit who will turn up, hold a programme, produce certification and not embarrass them in front of their own client.
What I built instead
A credibility site. What kind of work, in what kind of building, for how long, and who exactly you would be dealing with. Sectors named specifically rather than a generic list of services, because a care home job and a school job are not the same risk and the buyer knows it.
The only conversion on the whole site is an enquiry, and the page's job is to make the person feel confident before they send it.
Sectors, not services
Everyone lists testing and inspection. Naming schools, care homes and light industrial units tells a facilities manager you have done a building like theirs, which is the only thing they are actually screening for.
Length of trading, stated once and early
In commercial work, years trading is a proxy for whether you will still exist at the end of a twelve month programme. It is worth a line at the top and no more than that.
No prices, and no apology for it
A commercial job cannot be priced from a web page and any number shown would be a lie or a hedge. The site does not pretend to price and does not use free quote language to paper over it either.
The enquiry asks about the project, not the person
What building, what work, what timescale. Enough for the first reply to be useful rather than a request for more information, which is where most trade enquiries stall for a week.
Recreated in the style of a site the client admired
This one deliberately mirrors the structure and tone of a commercial contractor site the client pointed at. Sometimes the brief is to look like the thing that already works in a sector, and inventing a new visual language would have cost credibility rather than added it.
Contact details in the footer of every page, as text
Business buyers copy and paste. A phone number rendered inside a graphic is a phone number nobody will use.
Read this before asking me for a booking system
The test is simple. Can the job be fully specified by the customer, from information they already have, in under two minutes? An MOT can. A haircut can. A rewire of a care home cannot. If the answer is no, a booking flow will produce enquiries you have to unpick, appointments you have to move, and a site that quietly makes you look like you do not understand the work. The right build is the one that matches how the job is actually bought.
See it working
The sample is live and fully usable. Put a registration in, add things to a basket, go through the checkout. Nothing charges you and nothing is sent.