The night after a hailstorm, nobody is waiting for your homepage animation to finish.
Nobody in this situation is browsing
The furnace quit and it is eight degrees. Hail put holes through the skylight. A heavy March snow brought a limb down across the driveway overnight.
That person is not weighing up your workmanship. Three facts, fast: this is your trade, you come to this street, here is the number.
Assume everything is against you
Everyone dials at once after a storm, foothills and basements swallow reception, and a handset near empty starts throttling itself. Those three arrive together, reliably.
Build for the customer out on the foothills and the comfortable one takes care of itself. Words paint first, images follow, and nothing from another company sits between the caller and your number.
Put the after-hours terms up top
Overnight cover belongs in the opening screenful of the service page. Parked behind a footer link it may as well not be on offer.
Then define it properly. Someone answers until ten. Ring-back inside the hour. Storm weeks run worst-first and the rate is higher. Left vague, people read it as no.
Buttons that work with gloves on
January, snow on the ground, phone in one gloved hand. Links the size of a pencil eraser packed together simply do not get hit.
Give the call button real size, pin it so it rides along with the scroll, and leave dead space around it so nothing else steals the tap.
Time it yourself
Next job with poor reception, try to book yourself through your own form and put a stopwatch on it.
The number usually lands badly. What you signed off on a monitor indoors is not what a customer meets standing in a driveway in the cold.
