Almost everything written about web design in Sant Cugat assumes there is a shop with an address. There are a great many professionals here working from home or at the client premises: 8,225 people are registered as self-employed in the municipality, 7,480 of them in services, according to the municipality in figures portal at Idescat. For them a website works differently.
An audience that compares before writing
Another figure worth having in front of you: 63.4 % of the population aged fifteen and over has higher education, against 36.7 % for Catalonia. It does not mean they are difficult customers; it means they look at three websites before writing to one and they notice straight away when a page says nothing.
With no shop window, your website does the job of the premises
Premises say a lot without speaking: that you exist, that somebody is there, that you can walk in. When there are none, the website has to say all of that in the first ten seconds, and almost none of them do: they open with a catalogue sentence and leave the visitor hunting for proof that there is a person on the other side.
Want to know what it would cost you?
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.
The four questions it has to answer
1. Who is going to look after me?
Name, face and two lines about what you do. In a one-person business, the photo is you, and it works better than any stock illustration. How those photos get prepared and which permissions you need if somebody else appears is in photos for your website.
2. How far do you travel?
If you go to the client, say it with names: Sant Cugat, Valldoreix, Mira-sol, Rubí, Cerdanyola. Somebody searching on a phone wants to know whether you reach their street, not their province.
3. Roughly how much does it cost?
A range, a «from» price or the cost of the first visit. You do not need the full rate card; you need the visitor not to have to write in just to find out whether it is within budget. We go into it in showing prices on your website.
4. How do we start?
One single step, and make it easy: book a slot, a short form or a WhatsApp button. If there are three different routes, nobody takes any of them.
Three examples from here, no names
- Home physiotherapy. A service page with the municipalities covered, the price per session and a booking diary. The photo is her walking into a building, not a stock treatment table.
- Consulting for small companies. A home page with a clear sentence about who she helps, two cases with numbers and a four-field form. No address: just the area and a reply window.
- Renovations and interiors. Here the gallery rules, with before and after from three jobs, and a page explaining the process and the timings, which is what worries clients most.
All three have one thing in common: the website does not talk about the company, it talks about what is happening to the person reading it.
The address: when to publish it and when not
If you work from home, you do not have to show where you live. On the Google business profile you can hide the address and mark the areas you serve; it is done from the profile itself, as Google explains on its page about editing your business profile. On the website, instead of the street you put the area, the phone number and the reply window.
The proof that you exist
This carries the most weight when there are no premises. Three things, in order of effort: real reviews with names, two or three jobs told with a photo and the outcome, and a short video of you explaining how you work. With that you stop being a page and become somebody.
Selling while you are with a client
Whoever has no premises is usually busy exactly when somebody writes. That is why an online diary is worth more here than in a shop: the client books at eleven at night and you find out in the morning. How to set it up without tangles is in online booking for your business.
Here it gets decided on the train
Plenty of people in Sant Cugat work elsewhere and look at this sort of thing on the way: on the train, at the stop or on the sofa at eleven. That has two very practical consequences. One, that if the page takes three seconds to open, it does not get opened, which is in why your website is slow on mobile. And two, that the button to write or book has to be where the thumb lands, with no scrolling and no hunting.
Three pages are enough to start a site like this
Home, one page for the main service and contact. That is the minimum that works, and it is what we build in the first month. From there you add one page per service you actually sell, not per thing you know how to do.
We'll tell you in a ten-minute conversation
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.
What you do not need
A virtual office to fake having headquarters, badges and seals nobody awarded, and that list of «clients» with logos of companies you worked with for one afternoon. In a small city people ask around, and that falls apart on its own.
Catalan, Spanish and sometimes English
Catalan is not optional here and there is a fair international population, so an English version of the home page and the service page sometimes pays off. You do not need to translate the whole blog; we cover it in a website in Catalan and Spanish.
Working from home, sensibly
If the office is the dining room, two things are worth separating: the work computer and phone from the personal ones, and backups of client files. INCIBE material on remote work sums it up well for anyone without an IT department, which here is nearly everybody.
What web design in Sant Cugat costs
Our prices are published and they do not change by town: Tu Landing is 100 € a month and Tu Web 200 €, VAT on top and with no lock-in, with domain, hosting, email and maintenance included, and the domain in your name. For a professional with no premises, the one-page landing is usually plenty for the first year.
If you also want articles and the Google listing worked on, the presence plans are 400, 750 and 1,500 € a month. And if what you need is a tool to run the work, that goes by project and is in custom software in Sant Cugat.
How long it takes to have the site ready
A landing page with the copy sorted, one to two weeks. A site with several pages, three or four. What delays projects is almost never the design: it is the photos and the copy, which is why we start there.
What to look at in the first month
Three numbers, none of which needs a dashboard: how many people write or call from the site, how many book without calling, and which towns they come from. If people arrive but do not book, the problem is the price or the next step, not the design.
We are in Palamós and we come down to the Vallès
The first meeting is in person when it helps, and the rest remotely, which for anyone with a packed diary is usually what suits. If you have a site sitting idle, or none at all, send us the link or tell us what you do and we will tell you what we would do first, with no commitment.
Tell us what you need and we'll give you a price
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.