Websites for builders and groundworks
A builder gets judged on the last house he touched. Three live sites here, for building work, for render and external wall insulation, and for the groundworks half of it, and each of them opens with jobs a homeowner can look at rather than adjectives about quality.
Trust before price
A dripping tap gets sorted by whoever answers the phone, but a side extension means weighing up a large amount of money and a team in the house for weeks. Most of that thinking happens on a phone in the evening with nobody being rung, and before anyone picks up they want to see the last house you touched and hear what its owner thought of you.
That is the order GRF Construction’s site runs in. It opens with “Building work in Petts Wood, done to a standard you’ll be proud of”, and sitting directly beneath it is a credential nobody has to take my word for: his own Checkatrade rating of 9.96 out of 10 from 37 verified reviews, with the Checkatrade guarantee attached to it. That one line does more work than any paragraph I could write. Under it sit over a hundred photographs from genuine projects, which is the space most builders’ sites fill with three stock images and the word craftsmanship. He works out of Orpington and Petts Wood and covers Bromley, Dartford and Medway.
The groundworks half
Charles at Southridge Roofing & Groundworks does the parts of a job that get buried rather than admired: driveways, patios, drainage, retaining walls, rendering and roofing across Beckenham BR3, Chislehurst BR7, Catford SE6, Blackheath SE3 and the rest of south east London and north west Kent. A finished patio on its own hides the state of what was there before and the depth of what went in underneath it, so his galleries are built as pairs and the page says outright that there is “no stock, no borrowed pictures” in them.
His review section is already on the site and it is deliberately empty. Where the quotes will sit, it reads “Real customer reviews will appear here, in their own words, as they come in.” A homeowner who reads that knows exactly where the firm stands, which is a better start than a wall of praise from names nobody can go and look up.
Two ways to lose work
The obvious one is the dead site: built years ago by somebody long gone, still carrying a number that changed, still showing a van that got sold, and loading badly on the phone the enquiry is coming from. It quietly tells a homeowner that the business might not be running any more.
The second one costs more and gets spotted far less often. A builder pays for something that looks like a property developer’s brochure, all wide grey renders and thin type and the word bespoke, and the homeowner who wanted a garage conversion decides on sight that she cannot afford to ring. Overdesign is a price signal whether it was meant as one or not, which is why the sites above are plain on purpose. Pick A Block is the largest of the three: render, external wall insulation, roofing and block paving from one team, and the site runs to eighty-seven pages because that work is searched for by town and by job, and each pairing got a page with something true on it.
Missing proof
None of the three has left me a review, and none of the sites has a case study written behind it, so they are here as links rather than stories. Open them and judge the work instead of my description of it.
If the question in your head is whether one person can handle something large, the biggest things I have built are Pick A Block at eighty-seven pages and a plumbing and electrical estate of seventy, and the second one has the full account written up.
Start a project
Send me what you already have, the current site if there is one, and photographs off your phone including the ones taken in bad light at four o’clock because the customer wanted a look before you left. If there is a Checkatrade profile or a Google listing with reviews on it, that goes on the first screen, and it belongs to you rather than to me.
What comes back is my honest read on whether the website is the thing holding your work up. Sometimes it is not, and I would rather tell you that than sell you one.