Most of my work is from recommendation and most of the rest is from my website.
I have decent sign writing on my van (vehicle wrap) where I get the odd customer. If you search Redlake Plumbing you'll find a photograph of my van for an idea. Graphics cost about £500 but it's easily paid for itself.
I came from an IT background and it was quite easy for me to set up a website. It costs me about £6 a month and I don't pay for rankings or anything as I'm at or near the top.
There are loads of websites to help with design. You don't need any software nor to be online to create a website but if you have some it makes life much easier. The keyword/phrase to search is HTML tutorial - around 76 million websites from Google.
You need a plain text word processor (Wordpad) and a browser (Internet Explorer).
Five minutes with a tutorial will see you with your first website and a good day's work should see you finished with some sort of basic website with links, photographs and coloured text. One tip: before you tackle the website write down on a piece of paper the wording you want. It's surprising how writer's block siezes when you're fiddling with design.
To make your website "live" so others can see it you need a webhost. I use Fasthosts who are cheap and cheerful and that's where my £6 goes.
When you've done your website you need to "optimise" it to heave it up the search rankings in the search engines. Google SEO tutorial or Search Engine Optimization - again, a few million sites.
The trick with optimisation is to get the important words to the top of your website. The HTML file you create (in Wordpad) has some code and other bits and pieces. Computers read files from top to bottom. One of the first lines alters the name of the Internet Explorer page you open.
So with this website the home page is Plumbing Forum | Plumbing Advice | Plumbers Forums etc, etc.
Note how when someone searches for "Plumbing forum" the designers have geared the wording and that file to have Plumbing Forum very near the top of the source file. You can see the source file of any internet page by clicking on the View menu then clicking on Source.
If you have a look on my website (
http://www.redlakeplumbing.co.uk), note how in my links that home is on the right. Bathroom installations and boiler servicing come before that. Also look how many times plumbing is mentioned. And how I put the areas first. How do you Google for a plumber when you have a leaking tap? "Fix leaky tap"? "How do I get my tap fixed"? "Plumbing"? You're more likely to enter "Plumbers in SY7" or whatever. While my website is not No.1 on every search when you look down the listings it's usually first actual plumbing business after yell.com and websites like that, depending of course what you type in.
And there's another trick ... if you click on my website you help my rankings and send me further up the Google tree!!
Website design isn't difficult - just time consuming. Hope this helps.