What to send your web designer: a tradesman's prep checklist

The quality of a trade website is mostly decided before the designer writes a single line of code. A build that should be live in about a week stretches to a month for one reason above all others: the designer is waiting on photos, reviews and basic facts that only the tradesman can supply, and they arrive in dribs and drabs over four weeks of chased messages. Worse, when the material never arrives at all, the site gets built from stock photos and guessed wording, and it shows. Customers can smell a generic site in seconds. The fix costs you one evening. Gather a small, specific pack of material before the build starts, send it in one go, and you get a faster launch, better pages and a site that actually looks like your business rather than a template with your name dropped in. This is the exact checklist, in the order I ask my own clients for it.

Why the handover decides how good your website is

A web designer can supply the design, the code and the words, but not the raw material: the photos, reviews and local facts that make a trade website convincing can only come from the tradesman, so the quality of what you send sets the ceiling on the quality of the site.

Think of it like a customer who wants a quote but will not let you see the job. However good you are, you are guessing. A designer without your real photos reaches for stock images. Without your reviews, the site has no proof. Without knowing which jobs you actually want, every service gets equal billing, including the ones you hate. The build happens either way, but one version wins work and the other fills space.

Guesswork is visible

Homeowners have seen a thousand template sites with the same smiling stock plumber. What stops the scroll is a real ceiling repaired, a real garden transformed, a review with a street name in it. That material is sitting on your phone right now. The full rundown of what the finished page needs is in what a tradesman website should include; this checklist is how you supply it.

Slow handover, slow launch

Every missing item is a round trip: a message, a wait, a reminder. Designers do not sit idle in the gaps, they move on to other clients, and your build loses its slot. Send the whole pack up front and you jump the queue that half-prepared clients create for themselves.

The photos and proof that win the job

Send 10 to 20 daylight photos of finished work, before and after pairs where you have them, plus your genuine reviews copied word for word from Google or Checkatrade; real proof is the single strongest material a trade can hand a designer.

Proof sells trades. Not adjectives, not stock imagery, proof. This is the part of the pack worth the most care, and it is still only half an hour of scrolling your camera roll.

Job photos: what actually works

Ten to twenty is plenty. Daylight beats dusk, landscape beats portrait for big page sections, and finished beats in-progress. Before and after pairs are gold, because the pair shows the exact transformation the customer is buying. A bathroom stripped and a bathroom finished says more than any paragraph. If a job photographed badly, leave it out; twelve strong photos beat forty mixed ones.

You and the van

One decent photo of you, and one of the van if it is liveried, turns an anonymous site into a person a customer can imagine opening the door to. Plenty of trades skip this and the site is fine without it, but the ones who include it convert better, because hiring a trade is an act of trust in a stranger.

Reviews, copied exactly

Copy your best reviews word for word, with the first name and town of the customer. Do not tidy the grammar; real phrasing reads as real. If your reviews live on Google, Checkatrade or Trustpilot, say where, because the site should link back to the source so visitors can verify them. Thin on reviews? Ask your last five happy customers before the build starts; the method is in how to get more Google reviews as a tradesman.

The business facts only you know

A designer needs a plain list of the services you want more of, the towns and radius you cover, your years in the trade, and your registrations and insurance, because these facts become the pages that rank locally and the trust signals that convert.

None of this needs polish. Bullet points in a text or even a voice note while you drive between jobs is enough. The designer's job is turning it into copy; your job is making sure it is true and complete.

Services: what you want, not just what you do

List every service, then mark the two or three you actually want more of. A plumber who wants bathroom refits but keeps getting tap washers has usually got a website that bills everything equally. The site should lead with the work you want, and only you know what that is.

Areas: towns, not "the local area"

Name the towns and villages you cover and roughly how far you will travel. Local search runs on place names, so "Taunton, Wellington and villages within 30 minutes" gives a designer the raw material for area pages that "we cover the local area" never can.

The trust facts

Your trading name, phone number, email, years in the trade, public liability insurance, and any registrations: Gas Safe for gas work, NICEIC or NAPIT for electrics, TrustMark and the rest. Include the registration numbers so the site can display them properly, because a checkable number is a trust signal and a vague badge is wallpaper.

The logins and technical bits (access, not ownership)

If you already have a domain or a Google Business Profile, give your designer access rather than ownership: the domain stays registered in your name and the designer is added as a manager, never the other way round.

This is the part that scares people and it should not. There are only two or three items, and the rule for all of them is the same: share access, keep ownership.

Your domain

If you own a web address already, tell the designer where it is registered and share access to point it at the new site. It stays registered to you. If you do not have one, the designer can register one, but insist it goes in your name. Who owns what, and the other questions worth asking before you hire anyone, are covered in how to choose a website designer for tradesmen.

Your Google Business Profile

If you have a profile on Google Maps, add the designer as a manager from the profile settings rather than handing over your Google password; Google's own help pages walk through it in a couple of minutes. Linking the site and the profile together is one of the quickest local-visibility wins there is, and no profile at all is worth flagging so the designer can set one up alongside the build.

Anything that already exists

An old website, a Facebook page, a logo file if you have one. Even a dated site is useful, because it tells the designer what to keep, what to bin and which old pages need redirecting so you do not lose whatever Google presence the old site had.

How to hand it over and what happens next

Send the whole pack in one go, in whatever format is easiest (WhatsApp, email, a shared folder), because one complete handover is what lets a done-for-you build go from first message to live site in about a week.

Do not wait until everything is perfect. A designer would rather have twelve photos and rough bullet points today than a polished folder in three weeks. Send what you have, flag what is coming, and the build starts.

The one-evening method

Put the kettle on and do it in one sitting: half an hour picking photos, ten minutes copying reviews, ten minutes typing the service list and areas, five minutes on the trust facts, and a few more if there are logins to share. One evening, one message, done. The designer chases you for nothing and the site comes back looking like your business.

What a good designer does with it

Everything else. On a done-for-you plan the designer writes the copy, builds the pages, sorts hosting, SSL and the technical setup, and turns your photos and reviews into a site built to rank for your towns. That split of labour, your facts and their build, is exactly what a monthly plan from £50/month buys; the full numbers are on the tradesman website cost page.

The bottom line

A tradesman who sends the full pack gets a better website, faster, than one who pays twice as much and drip-feeds the material. The checklist is one evening: photos, reviews, services, areas, trust facts, access. For what it is worth, this is how I work too. Send me those things and I will build a free mockup of your actual business before you pay anything; if you like it, plans are done-for-you from £50/month with hosting, SSL and unlimited small edits included and no setup fee, usually live in about a week. Start at sitework.uk/#apply.