Caldwell & Sons
A family plumbing and heating firm, where the only job the website really has is getting a van onto a driveway.
- Sector
- Plumbing & heating
- Year
- 2026
- Structure
- Single page · Services · Online booking · Reviews · Owner’s job board
- Ground
- Deep navy
01 The brief
Nobody browses plumbers for pleasure. The visit happens at a kitchen table with a cold radiator, or in a lunch break when the landlord’s certificate is due — and the visitor wants three answers: will you turn up, what will it cost, and can I get you booked without spending my afternoon on the phone.
Most trade sites answer none of them. A gallery of stock spanners, “competitive rates”, and a contact form that goes quiet for two days. The brief was a site that behaves the way a good tradesman does: says the price, names the time, turns up in it.
02 The approach
Van livery, not brochure
A deep navy ground at #0e1c29 with copper and flame-blue detail — pipework and a healthy burner, the trade’s own colours. Barlow Condensed does the signage and Barlow the reading, so the whole site carries itself like well-kept kit rather than a marketing brochure.
Prices on the page
The boiler service is £89 and the CP12 is £75, printed next to the job. Where a price genuinely depends on the fault it says “from”, and the bathroom survey is free and says so. Nothing invented on a doorstep.
Booking against a live diary
The centrepiece: pick the job, a day and a two-to-three-hour arrival window, and the slot is checked against real capacity — two vans per window — before it confirms with a reference. Windows that fill up show as full and can’t be double-booked. Book a visit yourself and watch the availability change.
A job board in the yard office
Every booking lands on the owner’s job board the moment it confirms — grouped by day, with the customer’s address and phone a tap away, and each visit marked done or cancelled as the day runs. The demo sign-in hands you the password, so walk in and look.
Every build on this page uses a different type stack and a different ground colour, chosen for that business. That is what “never templated” means in practice — it is checkable, not a claim.
Typefaces
- 01 Barlow Condensed
- 02 Barlow
Ground
Deep navy
#0e1c29
03 The result
- Online booking that is real, not a callback form — availability is computed live, slots decrement as they are taken, and a full window refuses politely.
- A working job board at /admin: book a visit on the homepage, refresh the board, and it is there.
- The same booking module fits any appointment-led trade — barbers, MOT bays, dog groomers, physios.
- Static pages on the edge with a small serverless booking API behind them — the site stays sub-second while the diary stays live.
Caldwell & Sons is a concept build — our own work, not a client project. We invented the business and built the site properly, to the exact standard a paying client would get. We build sites like this for real businesses — see what we do for the trades.