Websites for builders, where the decision takes months and the gallery does the selling.

A blocked drain gets a website 40 seconds and a phone call. A rear extension gets one opened in June, opened again in August with a partner sitting alongside, and opened a third time in November once the bank has said yes. The same household will visit 6 or 8 times, from a phone at lunch, a laptop at night, and a tablet on the couch while they hold you up against 2 other builders.

That arc changes what the pages have to survive. Copy that only sells falls apart on the third read, because by then the reader has stopped being impressed and started checking for consistency. Does the project in the hero photograph appear anywhere else with a scope attached? Does the inclusions list say the same thing on the extensions page as it does on the custom homes page? Is the entity name at the bottom of the page the same one on the contract sample? Contradictions that nobody notices in a 40-second visit are obvious by visit 4.

It also changes what a good week looks like. The enquiry does not arrive on the first visit and nothing is broken when it does not. On the early visits the site is trying to stay on the shortlist, which means giving a returning reader something they have not already seen: a project added since last time, a cost page written like an adult wrote it, a plain description of how a variation gets priced mid-build. Most builder sites are generous to a first-time visitor and offer a fourth-time visitor nothing at all, which is precisely backwards for a purchase this size.

So we build for the long read. Deep pages that reward a second pass, a projects section that keeps growing, and a written account of how your jobs run from first sketch to handover, so a couple can go through it together at 9pm with you nowhere in the room.

Homeowners rarely type the word builder. They type the thing they want built: home extension, knockdown rebuild, second storey addition, granny flat, bathroom renovation, kitchen renovation, heritage restoration, shed conversion. Each of those is a different budget, a different approval path and frequently a different person. The extension searcher has a growing family and an existing mortgage. The knockdown rebuild searcher has already decided the current house is not worth saving. The bathroom searcher may be quietly testing you for a much larger job next year.

One Services page listing 9 offerings ranks for none of them. It has a single title tag, a single H1 and a couple of sentences per service, and it is competing with pages built entirely around one build type. Split them and each page gets its own title, its own selection of finished work, its own cost commentary and its own list of the worries that particular buyer arrives with.

That is the architecture behind Adelaide's Bathroom Network: service-tier pages for full renovations, ensuites, small bathrooms and accessibility work instead of one page trying to speak to all 4 buyers at once. It began ranking inside 8 weeks of going live. Underpinning Sydney was built the same way, with separate pages for residential underpinning, commercial work, screw piling and resin injection, and it reached the top 3 for its main search term.

The other half of the exercise is exclusion. If you do not take bathroom-only jobs, owner-builder consulting or insurance repair work, do not run a page that implies otherwise. Those enquiries will arrive, and every one of them costs you an evening to decline politely.

Ask a builder what wins work and the answer is the work. Then look at how the work is presented on most builder websites: 40 untitled photographs in a lightbox, uploaded in whatever order they came off a phone, with no suburb, no scope and no way for a reader to tell a modest rear extension from a full custom home.

A project somebody can name beats 10 they cannot. That means a page per build rather than a tile per build, and it means writing the parts a photograph cannot show. Read that way, the gallery answers the question the reader is actually holding, which is never can you build, and always have you built mine.

There is a search consequence as well. A named project page can rank for the suburb alongside the build type, and it collects links honestly, because the architect, the joiner, the engineer and the tile supplier who worked on that job all have a reason to point at it. A photograph inside a slider gives them nothing to link to.

Weight matters here more than on any other kind of site we build. Builder galleries are enormous, and a gallery that takes several seconds to appear on a phone loses the person scrolling in bed. Luke Jones Architects is the same problem in its purest form, a practice where the photography is the entire argument, so that site is built to carry images at full width without dragging its feet.

Somewhere between the shortlist and the contract, a homeowner types your business name next to the word licence, or opens the public register their state keeps. In South Australia that register is run by Consumer and Business Services, in New South Wales by Fair Trading, in Victoria by the Victorian Building Authority, and in Queensland by the QBCC. Every one of them asks for a name or a number. If the reader cannot find either on your website, they either give up on you or they search the wrong entity and reach a conclusion you never earned.

So the licence number belongs on the page as selectable text, not baked into a logo image where nobody can copy it. The trading name on the site has to match the name the licence is registered to, exactly. Where the company holding the licence is not the name painted on the ute, say so plainly on the about page, because a mismatch a stranger discovers on a government register reads far worse than an explanation you offered first.

Insurance sits in the same part of the buyer's process. Public liability, and the statutory home warranty or building indemnity cover that applies to residential work in your state (it goes by a different name in nearly every state), are things a careful client raises at quote stage with some embarrassment. We are not insurers and we will not tell you what cover your contracts require, which is a question for your broker, but whatever you do carry should be findable in writing on the site rather than produced on request.

Association memberships belong here too, with the membership number rather than just the badge. None of this is decoration. It is the checklist a nervous person works through before letting a stranger take a wall out of their house, and having it on the page means you pass the check without ever knowing it happened.

Get a free quote is the wrong button on a builder's website. Nobody prices a knockdown rebuild off a web form and both sides know it. What the enquiry really begins is a slow, staged conversation: a look at whatever drawings exist, a walk of the site, a preliminary estimate, sometimes a paid design and construct agreement long before a fixed price is written.

That means the form is not there to capture a job. It is there to sort a stranger into a stage, so the reply you write is the right one. The fields that earn their place are few.

The difference this makes is bigger than it sounds. An enquiry that says extension, plans drawn, Prospect, ready after Christmas, with a budget band attached, tells you in seconds whether to make room this week. An enquiry that says hi, can I get a quote, costs you an evening to find out the same thing.

It also keeps the reader who is not ready yet. Somebody 8 months out will not hand over a phone number to a form promising an immediate callback, but they will tell you what they are planning if the page states what happens next, in what order, how long each stage takes and what any of it costs. Publish that sequence. It is the single most reassuring thing on a builder's website, and almost nobody writes it down.