We built our own first: the SB Locksmith site

Most website studios have never had to answer a phone at 11pm. We run SB Locksmith in Melbourne, and the first site we ever built is the one our own business depends on.

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.

We built our own site around that call, and everything this studio sells came out of what we learned doing it.

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 one case study on our work page.

The three things it taught us

Publishing the callout fee wins better calls. We resisted it for a long time. When we finally put the number up, the volume dropped and the bookings went up, because the people who rang had already accepted the price.

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. Ours is on our own domain with our own keys, which is why we can change a price at ten at night without asking anyone. That is the same deal every client gets — see what owning it means.

We are not a marketing agency that discovered trades. We are a trade business that got sick of what was on offer and built its own, then found other trades wanted the same thing.

What we cannot show you yet

Results from other people's businesses. We are taking on our first three clients now and publishing the real numbers when there are real numbers — with their permission, and only figures we can back up. Anything else would be an invented case study, and this industry has enough of those.