Refrigeration and the Internet #1: Homepages for Refrigeration Engineers

Hardly any development in recent years has influenced our everyday and business lives as much as the Internet. Our industry is not unaffected by this either. In a short series in our blog, we will therefore highlight various aspects of the Internet and their impact and significance for us in refrigeration. Part 1 is about the website of Refrigeration companies.

Whether you want to check the weather before an installation, need directions to the construction site or need to buy a barbecue for the company party. For an extremely large number of problems, the Internet is now the very first point of contact on the way to a solution. Logically, this also applies to the refrigeration trade. The customer who needs a split air-conditioning solution for his bedroom, if he doesn't know any refrigeration plant manufacturers, starts his research on Google, as does the restaurateur who needs a new cold storage cell or the project manager who is looking for contacts for the refrigeration part of his bill of quantities. All potential customers - whoever as a refrigeration plant builder does not have an Internet site today must have very good reasons for this. This is nothing new by now. But too often we run across websites that are so poorly designed that it would have been better to leave it alone. In this blog post, therefore, I would like to explain what we think makes a good website for a plant engineering company, what experience has shown to be useful, and what elements a website should contain.

Anyone who studies the subject a little will realize that it is anything but trivial and is constantly evolving. It feels like the Internet is reinvented every few months, and with all the trends flowing through the digital ether, from search engine optimization to Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, tradesmen's agencies, blogs, Web 2.0, 3.0 and Industry 4.0, it's anything but easy to keep track of everything. Naturally, we deal intensively with the Internet and are therefore also often the first point of contact for our customers when it comes to questions such as: "Do I have to tweet as a refrigeration installer?" "Do I need a Facebook fan page?" "My Internet agency has made me an offer for my website. What do you think?" and so on.

In this blog post, let me try to summarize a few of the lessons learned over the years. Although there can never be a general rule of thumb that works for every business, there are avoidable pitfalls. As with almost everything, it makes sense not to jump right in, but to ask yourself a few questions first.

What is the goal of your website?

Sitting down with a piece of paper and pen before designing your website and first sketching out what purpose you want it to serve will make your website better. Try to put yourself in the shoes of a customer searching for your service. For craft services, Google is increasingly the starting point for any research. How would you proceed if you were searching for your service? What would you Google for? What would you hope to find?

If you provide services in a local area, search terms such as "refrigeration engineer Meppen" or "install air conditioning Münsterland" are common. If you work nationwide and are highly specialized, a broader spread may make sense, for example on terms like "conservatory air conditioning". Make sure that these terms appear in the texts on your homepage. Google "reads" your web page and understands relatively well what it is about. Based on this, among other things, Google decides how relevant your web page is in the search results for a particular term. However, don't make the mistake of "spamming" your page full of that search term. Design your website for your customer, not for Google.

A customer looking for a refrigeration service provider wants to use their web research to find a company that is able to reliably perform the service they need. Again, try to put yourself in the customer's shoes or take a look yourself when looking for a service. What do customers value?

• the craftsman is relevant, so can implement the service I am looking for.
• the craftsman works with high quality, i.e. is able to implement the desired quality
• the craftsman works within a price and time frame that is acceptable to me (as a rule, the website alone will not be able to provide information about this, but personal consultation. But we must first get to the point that the customer makes his request to you!)
• Contact information is easy to find and the craftsman can be reached

This all sounds trivial. But how often have you seen websites that were last revised by the neighbor's boy in 1998, overloaded with gimmicks, poorly designed and uninformative? How often have you had to search for the phone number of the contact person for minutes? Only to be unable to reach anyone? On the Internet, the nearest competitor is always just two clicks away. This now almost hackneyed phrase demonstrates the necessity of a professional Internet presence. If you don't have a professional website, but your competitor three streets away does - who is more likely to get orders?

Contents

Your website is the XXL business card of your company. It should be well designed and also be able to be displayed reasonably on smartphones and tablets (this is called responsive). On your website you should give an overview of your range of services. If possible, provide references! Experience has shown that this increases visitors' confidence in your services. Besides photos, (real!) customer testimonials are extremely helpful. Ask a few regular customers if they would be willing to give a short statement. If you are a member of a guild or similar, show this (but if necessary, make sure that you are allowed to use the logos).

In general, you should use a healthy mix of images and text. Eternal texts, for example on how a refrigeration system works or on the advantages of an air conditioning system are, in our experience, almost always a wasted effort. The customer who is on the website of a refrigeration system manufacturer is already there because he is interested in a corresponding solution - and thermodynamic principles usually do not interest him. To demonstrate competence, reasonably structured references as shown above with pictures of finished plants and - where possible - with customer testimonials are better suited. If you have the possibility to create professional (!) videos, this is the "supreme discipline" of website design - for the vast majority of companies, however, effort and return are not in a reasonable ratio.

If your company already has a story, you should tell it! What is the story of how your company came into being? What were important milestones? How did you get into refrigeration? Who are the people behind the company? Show your face and make your company tangible. We believe that your customers are people too and want to work with people - not anonymous stalls. When it comes to the "story" aspect, one or two times our customers have remarked that they don't want to present employees on the website for fear of headhunters. We believe that an employee who is willing to change or a resourceful competitor will not be deterred by the presence or absence of an introduction on the website. In addition, the presentation of employees on the website can be an important aspect of appreciation - but take this aspect into account in your considerations.

The main task of your website is to encourage visitors to get in touch with you. Your telephone number should therefore be right next to your logo and be clearly visible on every page of your website. It also makes sense to set up contact forms. Make sure that inquiries by email and of course by phone are well answered. I will go into this in more detail in a future blog post. If you offer special services or guarantees (24-hour emergency service, etc.), it makes sense to also display these in the header.

Please also take into account that there are certain legal aspects of a website that must be complied with, such as the imprint. Images should also only be used if you have the rights to do so. Sloppiness here can quickly become very expensive.

Technology

Outline the structure of your website based on these aspects and any other elements that are important to you personally. Once the rough basic framework is in place, it's time for implementation. Here you have to ask yourself how good your technical skills are and how much time you have. If you are confident and have the time, there are now numerous solutions to set up homepages in the modular principle. These do not require any programming skills and it is easy to achieve professional results. The customization options are manageable - but usually perfectly sufficient for the website of a refrigeration system builder. In our opinion, the leading homepage construction kit provider is Jimdo, whereby also other solutions like Wix are very good. Do yourself a favor and pay the mostly low basic fee for these modular systems. The free basic versions usually include a note about this on the website. And what would you think of a company that doesn't even want to spend the few euros for such a license?

If the possibilities of these modular systems are not enough for you, an alternative with a bit more customization possibilities is a so-called content management system - the world's leading and most recommended systems here are Wordpress and Joomla. The skills needed for such a CMS system are a bit higher, but quite learnable. However, when creating your website, as mentioned before, ask yourself if you have the time, the desire and the skills to do it. You probably know yourself how "gratifying" it is as a system builder to be called to systems that someone outside your field has tried their hand at. Website design is also a craft with a right to exist. A professional can take a lot of the work off your hands here, so you can worry about the refrigeration craft. Keep in mind, however, that it's often common for the client to supply the web designer with text and photos for the site - and don't underestimate this effort. In any case, make sure your web designer understands what the goals of your website are. Talk to him about what you do as a business and have him suggest ways to convey that. Two heads have more ideas than one.

Depending on the scope of your project, the cost of a professional installation will probably be in the mid three-digit to mid four-digit range. As a rule, i.e. if your project is not completely exotic, the professional will also install and set up a content management system. We recommend that you let the web designer show you how to change texts, for example, so that you are not permanently dependent on a service provider if an image needs to be changed.

What we definitely do not recommend are self-made solutions or programs that are permanently installed on the computer, such as Frontpage. Even if you or someone in your circle of acquaintances is possibly IT-savvy and can program something, on the one hand the effort and return are out of proportion and on the other hand even very good self-developed solutions are usually inferior to content management systems, for example in aspects such as search engine optimization. Wordpress has been installed several hundred million times and is accordingly technically mature to the finest. Self-built solutions are almost always inferior here - and not infrequently also difficult to adapt and maintain.

Get Feedback!

Even if it's not always easy: Ask for feedback. Both customers and people completely unfamiliar with the subject. Over time, it is impossible to avoid becoming "blind to your business", overlooking errors or designing without the target group in mind. At various stages of the website's development, you should therefore always involve third parties and ask them for their opinions. It's also helpful to ask someone to perform a specific task on a website (such as "send us a message using the contact form" or "find out if we do gastro-cooling", etc.) and think out loud while performing that task. This way, you may notice things like buttons that are hard to find or something similar.

And Further?

Now that your website has finally gone online after a lot of work, it's time to make it popular - after all, what good is all the effort if no one visits the website? The website must be promoted! We will present you the possibilities in the second and next part of our small series. If you liked the article or you just want to have our opinion about your website, feel free to contact us - if you know websites of craftsmen that you find particularly good, feel free to present them in the discussion. And also, if I've missed completely important aspects of web design, or I haven't mentioned an absolutely groundbreaking content management system or anything else, I look forward to your feedback.