Bilingual website for a heating contractor in Hofheim

Situation

A heating and plumbing contractor in Hofheim am Taunus, 14 staff, about €1.8 million in annual revenue. The website dated from 2014. It did not work on a phone, listed a fax number, and showed prices from before the last two changes to the heating law. About two quote requests a month came through the site. The rest of the work came by phone and referral.

Two things had changed. Heat-pump enquiries now start with a search on a phone, usually in the evening. And a good share of the households in Hofheim and the neighbouring Main-Taunus towns speak English at home, because one parent works for a Frankfurt bank or a company in Eschborn. Those households were calling competitors in Frankfurt who had an English page.

The owner wanted a site his office manager could update without calling anyone.

Approach

We agreed the scope in a 90-minute call and quoted a fixed price the next day: the five-to-eight-page business site at €6,500, plus €1,350 for the second language. Seven pages: home, heating, bathrooms, heat pumps and subsidies, emergency service, about us, contact. Each page in German and English, with the English written for a household that has just moved to Germany and does not know what a Schornsteinfeger is.

Technology in plain words: a fast static site with a small content editor behind a password. No plugins to patch, nothing to update monthly. Hosting on a German provider at about €15 a month, which the client pays directly. A quote-request form with photo upload, because a photo of the boiler answers half the questions. Structured data so search engines read the opening hours and service area correctly.

GDPR boilerplate came with it: imprint, privacy notice, a contact form that stores nothing beyond the request, and cookie-free visitor statistics, so no cookie banner is needed.

We wrote the first draft of every page from a two-hour interview with the owner and the office manager, then corrected it with them in two rounds. Photos came from a half-day with a local photographer, booked and paid separately at about €600.

Result

In this scenario the site went live in week six. Quote requests through the form rose from about 2 a month to about 9 a month across the first quarter, roughly a third of them in English. The office manager updates prices and holiday notices herself, about 10 minutes a change. Mobile performance scored 96 of 100 at launch. Within three months the site ranked on the first page for “Wärmepumpe Hofheim” and “heating engineer Hofheim”.

What it cost

€7,850 fixed price, quoted before the work started: €6,500 for the seven-page business site with content editor and GDPR boilerplate, and €1,350 for the full English version. Hosting at about €15 a month and the photographer’s fee are third-party costs, paid by the client and excluded from the guarantee. The build itself is covered by our 100% money-back guarantee: full refund on request within 14 days of delivery, and for a monthly retainer the first month is refundable in full.

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