The business
We built Newcastle Plumbing a 449-page website for the Hunter: 92 service pages, 280 suburb pages on real maps, 50 guides and online booking.
Newcastle Plumbing is a local plumbing business with its own licensed plumbers. It takes on blocked drains, hot water, leaks, burst pipes and gas work across Newcastle, Lake Macquarie, Maitland, Port Stephens, Cessnock and the Hunter Valley, and the northern end of the Central Coast. Its promise to customers is simple: a written, fixed price before any work starts.
280
suburb pages with real maps
The brief
People with a plumbing problem rarely know the trade name for the job. They describe what they can see, such as a gurgling drain or no hot water, and where they live. The brief was a site with a proper page for each of those starting points, built on one plan so that the phone number, the quote form and the booking button sit in the same places on every page.
The site also launched with a new logo, a red N mark beside the name, carried through a red, navy and yellow design.
What we built
Services that start from the problem
The 92 service pages sit in five groups: Emergency, Drains, Hot water and gas, Leaks and pipes, and Maintenance. Each group has a menu that opens with a list of problems a homeowner can see, beside every service in that group and an offer panel with a call button. Service pages open with the problem in plain words, a fixed-price offer where one applies, a call button and a quote form already set to that service.
Further down, every service page tells the job as a story: five or six numbered steps, each with a photo and a note on what the customer gets at that point. On the Blocked Drains page, the story runs from working out which drains are slow to clearing the pipe and showing the cause on camera.
280 suburbs, each on a real map
Every suburb page names the postcode and council, shows the offers and the guarantee as four short cards, and fills the suburb into the quote form. Further down, the suburb sits on a boundary map with its neighbours, and each neighbour opens its own page. A panel beside the map gives the distance from Newcastle city, the land area, the water authority and census figures on the people and homes there. Six region pages group the suburbs, and the service-areas page maps all six regions with a suburb or postcode finder beside the map.
Tools that help before the call
A problem finder asks first whether anything dangerous is happening right now: water pouring out, sewage coming up or a smell of gas. Only then does it move on to the likely cause, a safe next step and the page that explains the fix. A numbered cut-away of a house explains 14 parts of a home's plumbing, from the water meter to the hot water system. The FAQ hub holds 90 answers in nine topics with its own search box, and the header search lists matching services and guides as the visitor types.
Fifty guides
The 50 guides explain plumbing problems before anyone needs to call. Each opens with its topic, reading time and a photo, then a contents list and key takeaways. The guide on blocked drain warning signs, for example, explains which signs point to one fixture and which point to the main sewer line.
Built for phones
The phone layout is built for someone standing next to the problem. The header keeps a round call button beside the menu button. The home page stacks the headline, a full-width call button and the quote button above the problem shortcuts. On service pages, a Call and Book bar stays fixed to the bottom of the screen while the visitor reads, so ringing or booking never means scrolling back to the top.
On a desktop screen, a small emergency panel appears in the corner once the visitor has scrolled well down the home page, with first-step advice for a burst pipe or a gas smell and a call button.
What it connects to
Every route through the site reaches the same team. The call buttons, the quote form and the booking page all lead to one of the business's own plumbers, and both forms ask for the suburb and the job, so the plumber who rings back already knows where and what. The booking page sets out what happens next in three steps: tell us what needs fixing, a plumber rings back, and a written, fixed price comes before any work starts.
Because every service and every suburb has its own page, advertising for a particular job or area has a matching page to land on. New services, suburbs and guides slot into the same plan without a redesign.
To plan a website like this for your business, see our website design work or our marketing for plumbing businesses.
