A stranger has to trust you before he will contact you

A stranger landing on your website is not deciding whether to buy from you. That decision is far away.

He is deciding something much smaller and much faster. Is it safe to spend an enquiry on these people. Will I get a sensible reply, or a sales call every week for a month.

That decision is usually made in under a minute, mostly on signals that have nothing to do with your services.

What actually answers the question

Real photographs of real work. Not stock images of a handshake. A stranger can tell the difference instantly, and a stock photo quietly says we had nothing of our own to show.

Names and faces. A site with no people on it reads as a company that might be one man and a laptop, which may be absolutely fine, but he does not know that yet.

Evidence of other customers. Who you have worked with, what you did for them, and ideally something they said. One real sentence from a named customer is worth more than a page of claims about quality.

A real address and a landline. These are small and they matter more than people expect, because they signal that you can be found if something goes wrong.

The thing most sites do instead

They assert. We are committed to excellence. We deliver quality on time. Customer satisfaction is our priority.

Every competitor says exactly the same, so none of it carries information. The reader skips it without noticing that he skipped it.

Replace one paragraph of assertion with one photograph of real work and one named customer, and the site becomes more convincing immediately, without a redesign.

Open your website and ask: what on this page would convince a stranger we are real?

Replacing assertions with evidence is usually the cheapest change we make to a website and one of the most effective. Send us your link and we will tell you what a stranger would actually believe.