A Website for a Renovation Company: How to Win Bigger Jobs
A renovation crew that does solid work usually has a calendar full of referrals. The trouble is what those referrals bring: painting one room, swapping the flooring in a single flat, patching up after someone who walked off the job. The full fit-out of a new-build apartment, or a whole-house renovation, goes to somebody else, even though you would have done it better than the firm that got it.
The reason is simpler than it looks. Someone about to spend tens of thousands and let strangers into their home for two months does not ring a number off a flyer. They check you in the evening, on a phone: they search Google for “renovation companies” plus their town, look at photos, hunt for reviews, and try to work out whether the business is real. If there is nothing to look at, they message three other crews that had something to show. This post is about building a site that wins that evening of research.
This customer checks you far longer than a plumber’s customer does
An emergency forces a fast decision. A flooded bathroom leaves no time to compare offers, so people call the first sensible number. A renovation is the opposite: nobody needs one today, everyone plans it ahead, and the decision ripens over weeks.
During those weeks the customer does three things. They collect names from friends and local Facebook groups, they search Google, and then they check each company separately. That last check almost always lands on your website, and there you either show up with a complete story or as a Facebook page whose last post is a year old. The site does not have to sell the renovation. It has to move someone from “maybe these people” to “I’ll message them first”.
They will give the site itself two or three minutes. Everything meant to convince them has to fit inside that.
Before-and-after photos are the heart of the site
In most service businesses the offer comes first. In renovation work it is different: the first proof a customer wants is pictures of what you have already built. Not renderings pulled off the internet, not shots from a paint manufacturer’s catalogue, but real homes with your work in them.
Before-and-after pairs carry the most weight, because they show the scale of the change and say something about you: that you take on the hard jobs rather than freshening up interiors that were fine already. A cramped 1970s flat where you replaced the wiring, straightened the walls and built a new bathroom lands harder than ten pretty frames from a brand-new apartment.
Your phone is enough, as long as you keep a few habits:
- shoot in daylight with the flash off, because flash flattens plaster texture and wrecks the colours,
- always take the “before” shot, even when the place looks grim, because without it the “after” loses half its power,
- stand in the same spot at the same angle for both frames, otherwise the comparison falls apart,
- clear the frame before the final shot, since a bucket, a dust sheet and an extension lead undo the sense of finished work,
- add one close-up detail, say where the tiling meets the door frame, because detail is what separates a careful crew from a cheap one.
Eight or ten projects from the past year are plenty. Group them by type: full fit-out, bathroom renovation, kitchen renovation, rental refresh. Someone looking specifically for a bathroom wants bathrooms side by side. Each group can also carry its own description with the phrase people actually type, which feeds straight into local SEO.
Say plainly what you do, and what you do not
Half the enquiries that waste your time come from things left unsaid. A customer writes, you book a visit, you drive across town, and on site it turns out they wanted floor screeding, which you do not do.
Instead of the vague “building and renovation services”, list the scope in plain words: stripping and levelling walls, skimming, painting, wall and floor tiling, laminate flooring, suspended ceilings, plasterboard builds, minor electrical and plumbing alterations. Then say separately what you do not take on and who you bring in when it comes up. “We handle the electrics and plumbing ourselves; made-to-measure joinery goes to a workshop we trust” is a sentence that builds confidence rather than draining it. Customers prefer a firm that knows its limits to one that claims everything.
If you do full turnkey fit-outs, describe that as its own service with its own paragraph. It is a different search intent from “bathroom renovation”, and a bigger wallet on the other side.
Price ranges beat silence
“Quote after a site visit” with no number attached reads as “the price depends on how wealthy you look”. With no reference point, people assume the worst and message the company that at least gave a rough band.
You do not have to publish a full estimate. Showing the order of magnitude, and explaining what moves the final figure, is enough.
| Scope | How to quote it | What to add next to it |
|---|---|---|
| Painting and skimming | per square metre of wall | whether priming is included |
| Bathroom of 5 m² | a from-to range for the whole labour | what falls to the customer, what to you |
| Turnkey fit-out | per square metre of the flat | the material standard you costed for |
| Small jobs | a day rate for the crew | the minimum booking |
Add one line about materials, because that is where most misunderstandings start. A customer who knows the figure covers labour, and that materials are bought by them or through you at trade prices, will not feel stung later.
A form that accepts photos and floor area
The phone works for the customer who has already decided. Everyone else writes in the evening, after work, once the kids are asleep and nobody picks up calls anyway. That makes the form on a renovation site the main tool, not decoration under the map.
A good form asks for what lets you reply with something concrete: the work needed, the floor area, the town, a rough start date, and room to attach a couple of photos. A picture of the wall or the old bathroom cuts three rounds of messages, because you can see the scale immediately. Do not ask for a budget in the first step, since that is the most common reason people close the tab. We wrote more about setting one up in the post on the contact form that actually gets enquiries.
Lead times and coverage area, the two sentences worth the most
Say where you travel. A crew based in a suburb that covers the southern half of the metro area should name the towns, because someone twenty minutes away will otherwise assume they are out of range and never write.
The second sentence is about the queue. Plenty of crews hide the fact that the next free slot is two months out, afraid the customer will walk. The effect is the opposite of the one intended: the customer finds out after the site visit and feels strung along. “We book ahead; the next free slots are usually six to eight weeks out” sounds like a company with work because it is good at the job. Anyone planning a spring renovation will happily take a place in that queue.
Alongside that, give the proof people look for in the background: liability insurance, a written contract, payments staged against milestones instead of a large deposit up front. Collect reviews with specifics in them. “Great crew, recommended” says nothing, while “bathroom renovation in a block of flats, finished on the day promised, cleaned up after themselves” says everything.
Where Sitario fits in
If the list above makes sense and you also know you will not sit down to build a website after twelve hours on site, that is where we come in. With Sitario you describe your company in a form, and in roughly an hour you are looking at a finished site with a project gallery, a scope of works and an enquiry form. You pay only once you have seen it and decided it is good. If you do not approve it, you get your money back.
The business website is a one-off PLN 249 with the first year of hosting included, and renewal starts only in year two, from PLN 149 a year. The domain and the code are yours, and enquiries from the form go to your inbox and to the panel. After launch the site is not left alone: the system suggests what is worth writing about, because it sees what people in your area are actually searching for, and once a week the panel gives you a plain-language summary of what happened on the site.
It is not for everyone. If you need a costing calculator that prices materials and labour, a job management system, or an integration with your stock software, that is agency territory and a bespoke build. We do one thing well: a solid service website with a gallery and a form that collects enquiries. We took the same angle in the guide to a website for a carpenter.
In short
Renovation customers decide slowly and check thoroughly, because the stakes are high. The site that wins shows before-and-after work, states plainly what you do and what you do not, gives price ranges with an explanation, accepts an enquiry with a photo and a floor area, names the area you cover and admits honestly to a waiting list. All of that fits on one site with a handful of subpages. If you want to start from the basics, read the guide to a website for a service business, then come back and work out how many enquiries a year you lose for want of ten photographs.