Shops and trades.
Footfall and phone calls, not vanity.

For most shops and trades the website has one job: get somebody to ring, or get them through the door. Everything that does not serve that is decoration, and decoration is what most of these sites are made of.

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What actually produces a call

A phone number that is tappable everywhere

Including a sticky call bar on a phone. It sounds trivial; it is the single highest-converting element on a trade site.

A map, directions, hours and live open status

The four things somebody checks before driving over. Hours that are wrong on a bank holiday cost a day of footfall.

Photographs of your actual work

Real jobs, real rooms, real vans. Stock photography reads as a company that has nothing to show, and it is obvious to customers in a way it never is to the business.

Real reviews, quoted verbatim

Yours, with the reviewer’s own words, not a paraphrase and never an invention. If you have not got many yet, the fix is asking customers, not writing some.

One tool that impresses a regular customer

A room estimator, a quote wizard, a flooring calculator. It gives people a reason to engage before they are ready to ring, and it is the thing competitors do not have.

Pitching it at the right level

The commonest failure in this trade is a site that looks nothing like the business it belongs to.

Value and local unless the evidence says otherwise

We research the real business before designing anything. A value flooring shop dressed as a design studio confuses the customers it has and attracts ones who will not buy.

Products scoped to what you actually sell

Not a catalogue copied from a supplier. Ten products you genuinely stock beat two hundred you would have to order.

Nothing unverifiable on the page

No "award winning" without the award, no "established 1985" unless it was. Claims nobody can check are the exact thing search quality raters are told to treat as a low signal.

When a shop should sell online, and when it should not

Sell online when delivery is solvable

Small, robust, consistent products with known delivery costs. Appliances, souvenirs, parts, consumables.

Do not sell online when the sale needs a conversation

Fitted flooring, made-to-measure blinds, anything surveyed or installed. Take the enquiry properly instead and let the shop do the selling.

If you do sell, charge delivery honestly

Server-side rules by distance, radius or tier, editable by you, with no overselling. Guessing a flat rate across an area means the far customers are subsidised by the near ones.

The four standards that decide how a shop site is built

None of these is a matter of taste. Each one is published, each one has a number attached, and each one is settled when the site is built rather than afterwards.

Card details should never reach your server. PCI DSS applies to every business taking card payments; which self-assessment questionnaire you may use depends on how card data is handled. The shortest, SAQ A, is open only to merchants who outsource card handling entirely - which is a checkout design decision, not paperwork.
Online payments authenticate. The FCA set 14 March 2022 as the UK e-commerce deadline for Strong Customer Authentication and expected full compliance from that date. Exemptions for low-value and repeat payments exist and a good provider applies them automatically, so most customers see nothing.
Distance sales carry a 14-day cancellation period. Under regulation 30 of the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013, the period for a sales contract ends 14 days after the day the goods come into the customer’s physical possession. A returns page that says something different is wrong.
Two and a half seconds is the speed target. Google’s Largest Contentful Paint guidance is 2.5 seconds or less at the 75th percentile of page loads, split between mobile and desktop. The 75th percentile is the point: a site that is quick on your own phone can still be failing for a quarter of its visitors.

Sources, checked 26 October 2026

PCI Security Standards Council, Document Library: where PCI DSS and the self-assessment questionnaires are published
Financial Conduct Authority, Deadline extension for Strong Customer Authentication: e-commerce deadline moved to 14 March 2022
legislation.gov.uk, Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013, regulation 30: the 14-day cancellation period
web.dev (Google), Largest Contentful Paint: 2.5 seconds or less at the 75th percentile of page loads

Questions

Before you ask.

Do we need a shop on the website?

Often not. If the sale needs a measure, a survey or a conversation, a well-built enquiry path beats a basket. We will tell you which one you are rather than selling you the bigger build.

Can you put our real Google reviews on the site?

Yes, verbatim and attributed. We will not write reviews and we will not paraphrase them into marketing copy.

What is the one thing that makes the biggest difference?

A tappable phone number, correct opening hours and photographs of your own work. In that order, and before anything clever.

Can we update prices ourselves?

Yes. Anything that genuinely changes gets an editor; anything that does not stays in code, because every editable block is something that can be broken by accident.

Ready to get started?

Tell us what you need. We will scope it, price it and build it.

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Shops and trades.Footfall and phone calls, not vanity.