Website Design & Build for Family-Run Plumbing & Heating Business
Website redesign to surface long-earned trust, simplify the enquiry journey and support ongoing PPC.
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Website Design & Build for PG Bones
Crucible designed and built a new website for PG Bones, a family-run plumbing and heating business based in Braintree, Essex. The company has been trading since 1965, holds a 5.0 Checkatrade rating, and offers everything from emergency plumbing to air source heat pump installation, yet very little of that came across when you landed on its website. Our job was to close the gap between the reputation the business had earned over six decades and the impression its website was making in the first few seconds.
What did PG Bones need?
PG Bones had built its reputation the slow way, through sixty years of looking after homes and commercial projects across Essex. The website was not reflecting it. The trust signals that matter most to a homeowner choosing a tradesperson, the Checkatrade rating, the accreditations, the family history, sat buried beneath dated design and long blocks of copy. The homepage presented its services as a row of small circular buttons that asked visitors to hunt for what they needed, and the forms that should have been converting interest into enquiries were tucked away in their own dropdown menu, separated from the services they related to.
The brief itself was deliberately contained. Keep the site structure as it was, replicate every existing page, and avoid inventing anything the business did not need. Careers and Community content could fold into a more concise About section, but beyond that the task was to take what already existed and present it properly, with the things customers actually care about brought to the surface. Checkatrade reviews, finance options with a clear route to apply, sixty years in business, and the company’s certifications all needed to be visible on the homepage, in that order of priority.
What approach did Crucible take?
We started with one question: what should someone know about PG Bones within five seconds of landing on the site? The answers were already there in the business. Trusted since 1965. A 5.0 Checkatrade rating with 100% positive reviews. Finance available, with an application a click away. A family firm that describes itself as big enough to cope and small enough to care. None of this needed writing so much as surfacing, so those points became the opening of the new homepage, sitting above the fold where a visitor sees them before reading a single paragraph.
The services followed the same logic. We replaced the row of circular buttons with clear service cards, each with its own photography and a direct route through to the relevant page, so someone looking for boiler repairs, a new bathroom or an air source heat pump can find what they need almost instantly. In the menu, the services were reorganised to read cleanly rather than sprawl, and every service page was rebuilt to the same consistent layout with a visible phone number and a clear call to action.
The forms were where the customer journey needed the most thought. Every page on the site should answer the question a visitor is silently asking, which is what do I do next. For most services, the answer is a straightforward contact form with a promise to respond within 24 hours. For Bathrooms and Boilers, the two services where customers arrive with more specific requirements, the service pages click through to a guided form that walks them through their options step by step. Moving those longer forms behind their relevant service pages also meant we could remove the separate forms dropdown from the navigation entirely, which left the menu doing one job instead of two.
What technology was used?
The website was rebuilt in WordPress, with a full site migration completed while keeping the existing page structure intact. Nothing was lost in the move, and PG Bones now has a site that is straightforward to manage and update in-house, without needing to come back to us for every small change.
A website that reflects the business
The old website undersold a genuinely good company. The new one puts the evidence first. A homeowner arriving from a Google search now sees the Checkatrade rating, the sixty years of trading, the finance options and the accreditations within seconds, and can get from any service page to an enquiry without working for it. The design is cleaner and more modern, but the real change is that the website now tells the same story the company’s customers have been telling since 1965.
Driving traffic through PPC
The redesign is one part of an ongoing relationship. We are now running PPC campaigns for PG Bones, targeting the searches that matter across its service areas and sending qualified traffic to the new site. The improvements to the service pages and forms were made with this in mind, so that visitors arriving from paid campaigns land on pages built to convert, with a clear next step in front of them. The website does the persuading, and the campaigns make sure the right people reach it.
Work with Crucible
We work with construction and property businesses across the UK, specialising in web design, SEO and PPC for these sectors. If your website is due an update, get in touch.