At 2am nobody reads your homepage. They want a price and a time.

When a pipe bursts at midnight, nobody reads an About Us page. They want to know somebody will come, roughly when, and roughly what it will cost. So this site opens with the job form instead of a headline, puts the call-out rates in public, and tells you when to ring the gas emergency line instead of a plumber.

Skip down and use it All six websites

Sector: Precision Plumbing
Where: Greater London
Layout: A job form at the top, then the answers underneath it.
Status: Demonstration · built and running

This is not client work. AQUA/01 does not exist. We invented the business, wrote everything on it and built the website to show how we would approach this trade. Every price, record and review inside it is made up, nothing you type is sent anywhere, and we are not claiming it won anybody any work.

01The brief

The business we invented, and the person landing on it.

A made-up company is only useful if it is specific enough to argue with. So each one has a real trade, real constraints and a visitor turning up in a particular state of mind.

AThe business: An independent emergency plumbing firm covering Greater London. Leaks and bursts at any hour, plus boilers, heating and bathrooms during the day. A small team of engineers, no call centre, no franchise.
BWho lands on it: Someone standing in a hallway at two in the morning with a phone in one hand and a bowl in the other. They are not browsing.
CWhat the site has to fix: Every second spent explaining the company is a second not spent getting help. And what stops people ringing a trade at 2am is not doubt about the plumbing, it is fear of the bill. The page has to start the job and be straight about money before it asks for a phone number.

02The decisions

Five decisions, and what forced each one.

Every one of these answers something about the business, not a preference of ours. They are also what makes this site different from the other five.

01
The form comes first, not a headline.
Nobody in an emergency reads a sales pitch. The quickest useful thing a website can do is let them say what has gone wrong.
On the page
The first thing on the screen is a grid of faults. Pick one and the page starts building a job: how urgent it is, a reference number and a rough arrival time.
02
Put the call-out rates on the page.
Not knowing what it will cost is why people ring three firms instead of one. Publishing the rates costs a little margin and wins the call.
On the page
A rates section listing the bands, the hours that move you between them and what is included — above the enquiry form, not hidden behind it.
03
Give a response window, not a promise.
'We will be there in 60 minutes' falls apart on a busy night, and that is the night the customer remembers. A window with its conditions attached survives a bad night and still reassures.
On the page
Coverage is drawn as areas with a response window on each, and the page says plainly what makes that window longer.
04
Tell people when not to call you.
Turning work away is the strongest trust signal a trade website has. It also stops the firm taking calls it is not allowed to take.
On the page
A section that sends a gas smell to the gas emergency line, a burst in the street to the water company and a flooded fuse box to the isolator — before it mentions the van.
05
One photograph, and it is of the kit.
Stock photos of plumbers giving a thumbs up are the signature of a site that sells leads. What the customer wants to know is what actually turns up.
On the page
A single captioned photograph of the equipment that arrives on the van. Everything else on the page is drawn or typeset.

03The build

Nothing in it is shared with the other five.

Six sites built out of the same set of parts would prove nothing. This one has its own typefaces, its own layout, its own drawings and its own working parts, made for it alone.

Typefaces: Switzer, one family throughout
Layout: Status bar, job form, then the answers
What you can do: Pick a fault, enter a postcode, get a job ticket
Photographs: One, of the kit that turns up
Deliberately left out: Stock trade photos, walls of review badges

04The built site

Now use it.

The whole website runs below, inside the frame. Every button, form and slider works, and nothing you type leaves this page.

aqua01.co.ukDemonstration

Starting the AQUA/01 demonstration

Everything above the frame is us. Everything inside it belongs to the invented business: its own typefaces, its own colours, its own voice. That is deliberate. An agency that puts its own look on every client site is selling you a template.

05What is missing

Everything that happens after somebody presses send.

A demonstration can only show the front of the job. The rest is where the enquiry goes, who picks it up, what it is allowed to see and how you know it worked.

If AQUA/01 were a real business, the ticket, note or quote a visitor builds here would land somewhere real: an inbox, a customer record, a job in the diary, with a name against it and a date it has to be answered by. The words would come from you, the prices from your own books, and we would agree what counts as working before anything got built. That part is most of the job, and no demonstration can honestly fake it.

Start a project How a job runs, stage by stage

At 2am nobody reads your homepage. They want a price and a time.

The form comes first, not a headline.

Put the call-out rates on the page.

Give a response window, not a promise.

Tell people when not to call you.

One photograph, and it is of the kit.