How to make a carpenter website that shows your work

For most trades a website is a way to be found and to reassure. For a carpenter it is also the work itself. A joiner or a fitter is selling the quality of a finish, and the only way to show a finish on a screen is a photograph. So the most useful thing you can do is not write clever copy. It is to build a small gallery of your best jobs and keep adding to it.

Your portfolio is the website

You do not need a camera or a photographer. A modern phone in good light is enough, and a few habits make all the difference. Shoot in daylight or with the room lights on, hold the phone level so the lines stay straight, and take the photo once the job is finished and the area is cleaned up. A fitted wardrobe, a staircase, a run of skirting, an oak worktop, a deck, all read far better in a clear, level, well lit photo than in any description you could write. Take more than you think you need and keep the best five or six per job.

Before and after pairs are worth the effort when the starting point was rough, because they show the problem you solved, not just the result. A tired box room next to the fitted storage you built in it says more about your value than a price ever will.

Say which kind of carpenter you are

Carpentry covers a lot of ground, and the person searching usually wants one specific thing. First fix and second fix are different jobs to different buyers. Bespoke joinery, fitted kitchens and wardrobes, staircases, decking and garden structures, door hanging, commercial shopfitting, each brings a different customer. If you name the work you take on, in plain words, you help the visitor see their own job in it, and you help search engines match you to what people type.

A short, honest list does more than a grand claim. Saying you fit kitchens, build fitted wardrobes and hang doors across your area tells a homeowner more than calling yourself a master craftsman. And if there is work you would rather not take, leaving it off the list saves everyone a phone call.

What a customer is judging before they call

Carpentry referrals are cautious. Someone has usually been given your name, and they are quietly checking two things: that your finished work matches what they were promised, and that you are the sort of tradesperson who turns up and clears up. Your photos answer the first. A few genuine reviews answer the second, and the ones that mention tidiness, timekeeping and a fair price carry more weight than a star rating on its own.

Two small things reassure more than people expect. Show your face or your van somewhere, so the site reads as a real person rather than a brochure. And put your phone number where a thumb can reach it, set to dial on a tap. Most people are looking on a phone, and asking them to copy a number out by hand is where a few of the enquiries quietly go missing.

Where carpentry work comes from, and how the site helps

Most carpenters get work from word of mouth, and a website does not replace that. What it does is catch the moment just after the recommendation, when the person types your name, or your trade and their town, into Google to see who they are dealing with. If they find a clear site with recent photos and your area named, the referral firms up. If they find nothing, you are relying on them to call a stranger on faith.

Two habits help that search land on you. Write the places you work into the words on the page, the actual towns rather than just a county, so the connection is plain. And set up a free Google listing so your patch shows on the map when someone nearby looks. Keep the spelling of your name, number and area the same on the listing, the site and anywhere else you appear, because mismatched details make Google hesitate. If you are on Checkatrade or Houzz, link to them, but treat your own site as the one place you fully control.

Keep it small, and keep it current

A carpenter does not need many pages. A home page that leads with your best work and says what you do, a gallery, a short about page, and a contact page will cover almost everything. The discipline is not building more pages. It is keeping the gallery current. A site whose newest photo is five years old reads as a business that has gone quiet. Ten minutes after a good job, adding a few shots, keeps it alive and gives a returning visitor something new to look at.

You can put those four pages in place in an afternoon on a template made for trades, then spend your real effort on the photographs, which are the part that wins the work. If you want to weigh up the routes and what they cost first, our guide to what a tradesman website costs in the UK lays the options out plainly.