A property maintenance business, with the admin built into the website
A brand-new trade business needed more than a brochure site. We designed and built the public website, an instant rough-price guide, a photo-led booking flow, private job tracking for customers and the staff portal that runs all of it — as one system.
Services: Website Design & Build · Booking & Enquiry Flows · Custom Business System · Technical SEO
Project snapshot
- Client
- Daltons Property Services
- Sector
- Property maintenance / Trades
- Goal
- Conversion
- Services
- Website Design & Build, Booking & Enquiry Flows, Custom Business System, Technical SEO
- Main challenge
- Launching with no customers, no reviews and no search history
- Output type
- Public website, customer booking and tracking flows, and a staff portal for running the work
The challenge
Daltons opened as a brand-new business. There was no customer base, no reviews and no search history, so the website was the entire shopfront — and it had to do the work a reputation normally does. It also had to answer the question every customer asks first, which is what a job costs, without committing a one-person business to a price it had not seen. And it had to do all of that without adding admin, because the owner quotes, schedules and does the jobs himself.
The insight
For a local trade, the website is not the marketing — it is the front desk. So we designed it around the three jobs that actually take time: giving people a price, taking a booking that is ready to quote, and keeping customers updated once work starts. Every one of those is a phone call the business no longer has to make.
“The website is not the marketing for a business like this. It is the front desk.”
Our approach
Three connected moves that gave the campaign a clear idea, platform-native execution and assets the brand could keep using.
Answer the price question first
Two taps — pick a service, pick the closest job — and a rough price appears, drawn from the same catalogue that builds the service pages. It is framed as a guide, with the exact price confirmed before work starts, so the business is never held to a number it has not seen.
Make the booking arrive ready to price
A seven-step wizard asks one thing per screen: service, postcode, urgency, date, photos, details, review. Photos upload straight from a phone, so a job can often be understood without a first visit, and answers are kept as the customer moves through.
Build the admin into the same system
Behind the login, enquiries become job records the owner works through — quote, schedule, progress, invoice — with a private tracking link that keeps the customer updated automatically instead of by phone.
What we created
- Public website with a page per service, designed mobile-first from 360px up
- Instant rough-price guide covering plumbing, handyman, exterior and garden work
- Seven-step booking wizard with photo upload straight from a phone
- Private job tracking on an unguessable link — no customer account to create
- Staff portal: dashboard, jobs, calendar, quotes and editable pricing rules
- Automatic customer emails as each job stage is advanced
- Technical SEO, structured data and a static sitemap
- Hosting, database, storage and email chosen to sit on free or near-free tiers
A note on the portal and tracking screenshots: we replaced the real customer data with fake data for data protection reasons. Every name, address, phone number, email and job note shown is invented. The interface, layout and workflow are exactly as delivered — only the people in it are fictional.
How the work connected to the wider system
The assets were not isolated pieces of content. They were built to move people along a clear path — from first attention through to reusable, repeatable launch infrastructure.
- Step 1
Enquiry
A rough price or a booking lands as a job record, with photos, postcode and urgency already attached.
- Step 2
Quote
The owner prices it in the portal with a rules-based calculator — labour rate, priority uplift, validity — on rates he can edit himself.
- Step 3
Delivery
The job moves through its stages on a calendar that knows the UK bank holidays, and extra work found on site is approved by the customer in writing.
- Step 4
Retention
The customer follows the same job on a private link — no account, no password, no chasing phone call — and the record stays with the business, not a platform.
Outputs and impact
Outputs delivered
- 1 public website, 4 service pages
- Instant rough-price guide
- 7-step booking flow with photo upload
- Customer job tracking by private link
- Staff portal with jobs, calendar and quotes
- Owner-editable pricing rules
Metrics & impact
5
Paying clients in week one
0
Existing customers at launch
2 taps
To a rough price
No login
Customer job tracking
What this project shows
A small business website earns its keep when it does the jobs that would otherwise be phone calls. Pricing, booking and progress updates are not extras bolted onto a brochure — they are the reason the site exists, and building them into one system is what stops a growing business drowning in admin.
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