Web design for pool and hot tub retailers, installers and service companies.

Walk into most pool and spa businesses and you are standing in three companies at once.

A shop, with shelves of chemicals and a water testing bench. A construction outfit that digs holes and sets slabs. And a service department running a route, taking emergency calls and opening and closing a few hundred pools a year on a schedule that cannot slip.

Then look at the website. Almost always it is a brochure for whichever of the three the owner enjoys most, usually the construction side, because that is the one with the photographs. The other two are the ones paying the hydro bill in August.

Three businesses, three readers, one domain

Nothing about these three customers is the same, including how long they think before they act.

The retail customer has a problem in their hand right now. Cloudy water, a seized valve, an algae bloom that appeared overnight. They want to know you are open, that you test water, that the part is on the shelf, and how late you are there on a Saturday.

The installation buyer has been thinking about this since last summer. They have a budget that is probably wrong, a yard they are not sure will take it, and a suspicion that the number they get quoted is not the number they will pay.

The service customer either has a contract with you or wants one, and the only question that matters is whether you are taking anybody new. If you are not, say so. A full service book is a credential, and the people you turn away this year are the ones who call first next year.

Three paths, three entry points, three different lengths of copy. A single services page listing all of it serves whoever happens to be the most patient reader, and that is nobody with a green pool.

The year has a shape and it is unforgiving

A long quiet stretch, a vertical wall in spring, a trading season, a smaller wall in autumn, then silence.

The spring wall is the part that breaks companies. Every pool in your territory wants opening in the same three weeks, your service phone rings all day, your counter is four deep and your installers are already behind on last year's carryover. Nothing gets improved in that window and nothing gets decided in it either.

So here is the awkward truth about rebuilding. The only stretch with enough attention in it runs from late autumn to the February home show, which is also the stretch when the cash is thinnest and you would rather not spend anything. That tension is real and worth naming out loud rather than pretending the project can be squeezed into April.

Two things make the off-season build worth it anyway. Search engines take weeks to grow confident in anything published yesterday. And the enquiries start landing well before the weather justifies them, because people think about the pool on the first mild weekend rather than the first swimmable one.

The water test is the whole retention engine

A pool owner has one reason to come back every few weeks all season, and it is not loyalty. Their water is a chemistry problem they do not understand and you have the machine that reads it.

Most sites treat that as a line on the services page. It sits closer to the centre of the business than anything else you do, and there is a page's worth of work in it.

• Which testing system you run and what it actually measures, because a customer who has had a bad reading somewhere else cares about that more than you would think.
• How much water to bring, from how deep, in what, and how soon it has to reach you. People turn up with a cup of surface water from yesterday and then disbelieve the result.
• Whether it costs anything, and whether it costs anything if they did not buy the chemicals from you.
• The hours of the testing bench, which are often not the hours of the store.
• What the common results mean. High combined chlorine, low alkalinity, high calcium hardness, stabilizer creeping up all season. Each one is a page, each one gets searched at ten at night by somebody holding a printout.

Those result pages are the most useful thing you can build for search, and they feed the counter rather than replacing it, because the answer to most of them ends in buying something.

One caution on the copy. Dose instructions belong on the product label and with whoever read the test, not in an article that does not know the volume of the pool. Write to explain, point people back to the label and to your counter, and keep it general enough to stay true for a vinyl pool, a concrete one and a tub.

Parts get searched by model, not by category

Your catalogue is sorted the way a supplier's catalogue is sorted. Pumps, filters, heaters, cleaners, salt systems.

That is not how the search happens. Somebody is squinting at a faded label on a pump housing, or reading a code off a hot tub cabinet, and typing exactly that string with the word "impeller" or "filter" or "circuit board" after it.

So the page you need is the one almost no dealer builds: a page per model, or at least per family, carrying the exact strings people type.

• The model and its variants, written the way the plate writes them rather than the way the brochure does.
• A photograph of where the serial plate hides on that unit, because half the calls to your counter are people who cannot find it.
• What fits it. Cartridge numbers, the right gasket, the part that always goes.
• What replaced it when it went out of production, and whether the new one drops straight in.
• Whether you stock it, order it weekly, or will not touch it.

Build twenty of those for the equipment most common in your territory and you pick up search nobody else has gone after, from people already at the buying end of the problem. Ordinary search work, applied to strings your competitors never bothered to write down.

The same logic runs under any online store behind it. A cart organized by category gets browsed. A cart organized by what fits gets bought.

One limit on that cart. Before anybody promises delivery on chemicals, talk to your carrier, because liquid sanitizers and granular oxidizers are not ordinary parcels and courier networks have their own rules about taking them to a residential door. Reserve online and collect in store is usually the answer, and it keeps the customer walking past the testing bench. Accessories, parts, covers and equipment post without anyone worrying. Split the store on that line rather than pretending it is not there.

An installation is a year-long decision

Inground construction is one of the slowest considered purchases a homeowner ever makes. They start reading in July, talk to a spouse through the autumn, get quotes in late winter and sign for a build that may not start for a season. Through all of it they are trying to answer one question, and it is not whether the company is any good. It is what this will actually cost by the time it is finished.

So the page that wins has the exclusions on it.

Excavation and what happens if rock or water turns up. Whether the price includes the pad, the coping, the decking, the fence, the gas line, the electrical, the landscaping and the grading afterwards. Who files the permits. Who deals with the locate. When each payment falls. How long the yard is a construction site. What the warranty covers on the shell against the equipment. What happens to the grass.

Publish a stage by stage sequence with a realistic duration on each stage, and a current lead time you are willing to be held to. The buyer is comparing three quotes written on three different assumptions and has no way to normalize them. The company that makes the comparison possible generally gets the job, even at a higher number.

Two things belong on that page and are almost never there. Safety enclosures are governed by municipal bylaw in Ontario, the requirements genuinely differ from one town to the next, and a permit is usually part of it, so name the municipalities you work in, say what each expects and who files it, and tell the reader to confirm with their own town because bylaws get amended. And the electrical side normally means a licensed contractor, a permit and an inspection, which is real money the customer has not budgeted for and would rather hear from you than from an inspector.

Hot tubs are a second season, not a second product

The useful thing about the tub side is that it runs on the opposite clock. Interest climbs through autumn, peaks near the holidays and holds through the cold months when the pool half of your website is asleep. Most dealers bury it under the pool navigation anyway, which wastes the only counter-seasonal asset in the building.

Give it its own section, written for a buyer weighing a tub against a holiday and against doing nothing. Then write the page nobody writes, which is the delivery check.

• How wide the gate has to be, and what happens when there is no gate.
• What a slope or a set of steps on the route changes.
• What the pad has to be, how thick, and whether you pour it.
• The electrical requirement in plain terms, who arranges it, and roughly what it adds.
• What happens if a crane is the only way in, and what that costs.
• How long between order and water in the tub.

Half the reason people stall on a tub is a quiet suspicion that it will not fit. Answer that on a page and the stall goes away.

Openings, closings and the queue

Booking an opening is not a transaction, it is a place in a line, and almost every dealer handles it with a contact form and then spends six weeks on the phone explaining where people sit.

Build it as a queue instead. Take a date range rather than a date. Collect the address, the pool type, the cover type, whether the water was left low, whether your crew winterized it, and a photograph of the cover, which tells an installer more than four questions would. Show roughly how far out you are currently booking. Let contract holders book ahead of the open list, because that is the main thing a contract is actually selling.

Do the same for closings, with the one extra field that matters, which is whether anybody will be home.

A visible queue takes more calls off your counter in May than any other change available to you.

Commercial and public water is a different buyer

If you also hold hotel, condominium, campground or community pool contracts, that work belongs in its own section rather than a line in the footer.

Public and commercial pools sit under public health rules and get inspected, which residential pools do not, and the person hiring you is managing a compliance risk rather than a swimming pool. Testing frequency, record keeping, what happens when a reading is out, response times, who is certified to do what, and whether you carry the insurance and clearance documents a procurement team will ask for. Check the detail that applies to your own contracts against the regulations themselves, not against anybody's marketing page.

This work is less weather bound, it tenders on a calendar, and it is worth chasing in the months when nothing else moves.

Where you are already listed, whether you like it or not

Your manufacturers run dealer locators, and those locator pages frequently outrank dealer websites for the brand name plus a town. That is a listing to claim and keep accurate rather than a thing to complain about, with the right address, the right hours and a link that works.

Then build your own page for each brand you carry, saying what you stock, what you service and what you will not touch. Brand plus town is a search with real intent behind it and the dealer who writes that page is usually the only one who has.

The Google Business Profile matters more than the website does in spring, because "pool store near me" is a map search made by somebody already in the car. Hours, including the seasonal ones you change twice a year, are the field most dealers forget.

No dealer is named on this page

There is pool and spa work behind us. It is not identified here and will not be, because that call belongs to the owner, and in a trade where the next dealer is twenty minutes down the highway it is an easy call to understand.

Which puts the weight on everything above. Try it in a conversation. Ask which of your three businesses the current site is actually serving, or what your counter staff get asked twenty times a week that the site has never answered. The reply tells you whether any of this came from standing in a pool store in May. If it is finished builds you would sooner look at, several are on the work page.

What a build costs, and the month to spend it

Nobody gets a build out of us below $5,000. A dealer site doing all three jobs properly sits above that, and the reason is volume rather than finish: a service booking flow, a parts catalogue with model pages, an installation section with real stage detail and a tub section are four builds wearing one coat. The figure is fixed before anything starts and each phase is billed when it ships.

Three and a half weeks is the far end of a build, a week and a half the near one. What deserves planning is everything on either side of that, because a site landing in April has missed the run-up that produced the spring. Decide in November, brief it in December, be live by the home show, and let it spend eight quiet weeks getting crawled before anybody needs it.

The arithmetic is set out in what a website costs, and the parts of a schedule that sit with you rather than with us are in how long a website takes. If you already know which of your three businesses the site is failing, tell us which one.