The first site we built: SB Locksmith

Most website studios have never had to build the thing that makes a phone ring at 11pm. Our first client was a Melbourne locksmith, and everything this studio sells came out of building their site.

There is a particular feeling when the phone rings at eleven at night and somebody is standing outside their own front door. They are cold, they are annoyed with themselves, and the first thing they ask is how much.

SB Locksmith is not our business — they are our client, and that call is theirs. But the site we built for them was built around it, and everything this studio sells came out of doing that properly the first time.

What we built

• A guided quote that asks the three questions we would have asked on the phone anyway, and gives a real number at the end.
• Online booking, so a job that does not need a conversation never becomes one.
• One emergency button that sits above everything else, because at 11pm nobody reads.
• A separate path for the commercial work, which is a completely different customer searching at a completely different time of day.

You can open it and judge it the way a customer would: sblocksmith.com.au. It is also the case study on our work page.

The three things it taught us

Publishing the callout fee changes who rings. It is the one thing every tradie argues about, and the logic is hard to get around: if the number is on the page, the person who rings has already read it. The conversation starts at when can you get here instead of fifteen minutes of how much.

Speed is not a technical nicety. The person on the doorstep has a phone at eight per cent battery on a bad connection. A site that takes eight seconds does not get read; it gets closed.

Owning it matters more than you think until you don't own it. Theirs is on their own domain with their own keys, which is why a price can change at ten at night without asking anyone — including us. That is the same deal every client gets — see what owning it means.

We are not a marketing agency that discovered trades. We are the people who build the thing, and the first one we built was for a locksmith who needed the phone to ring — not a brochure. Other trades turned out to need the same.

What we cannot show you yet

Numbers. We are taking on our next clients now and publishing the real figures when there are real figures — with permission, and only what we can back up if someone asks. Anything else would be an invented case study, and this industry has enough of those.