Case study
A landing page for a company that doesn't exist
Hush Climate Co. installs air conditioning in Surrey. There's no such business. The buyer research behind the page is real, and so is every objection it was built to answer, in the order they actually come up.
Nobody buys air conditioning on a nice day. They buy it at two in the morning, awake for the third night running, in a bedroom that hasn't dropped below twenty-five degrees since June. By breakfast they're searching "how much to install aircon" on a phone with 4% battery.
Hush Climate Co. is invented. There's no van, no engineer, no real business behind the phone number on the page. What isn't invented is the person searching at 2am, or the six doubts that stand between them and booking a survey. I built the page around those doubts, in the order they show up.
The brief I wrote myself
Sell an unglamorous product to a worried buyer
Aircon isn't a fun purchase. Nobody dreams about it, and the trade has a reputation problem: cowboys, vague quotes, a grey box that turns up looking nothing like the render. I didn't want a page selling excitement. I wanted one that quietly took every worry off the table before the buyer had to ask.
The brief was: build the page around the doubts, not the product. Cost first, because it's the first thing anyone thinks. Then running cost, because a cheap install with a terrifying bill is worse than no install. Then the UK-specific one nobody else answers honestly: is this even worth it here.
The decisions
Five calls, in the order the doubts arrive
Answer cost before anyone has to ask
The pricing section sits high on the page with three honest from-prices: £1,995 for one room, £3,450 for upstairs, £5,900 for the whole house. Most installers in this trade make you request a quote before you learn anything.
Hiding the price doesn't make people call more. It makes the ones who'd have said yes leave and compare you to someone who did answer. A published from-price loses the customers who were never going to afford it anyway, and keeps the ones who were.
Make the page cool as you scroll
As you move down the page, the background genuinely shifts from a warm, stuffy palette to a cool one, timed to scroll position. You feel the thing being sold before you finish reading about it.
A written promise ("stays cool all summer") is a claim. A page that visibly cools around you while you read is closer to a demonstration, and demonstrations beat claims every time trust is the thing being sold.
Answer the one objection nobody else does
There's a straight COOL/HEAT toggle on the page proving the same unit runs backwards in winter, at roughly 12p an hour against 49p for a plug-in heater. It exists because the biggest objection in this trade isn't price. It's "is this even worth it for six weeks a year in Britain".
Most competitors skip this because the honest answer requires admitting the summer pitch alone is weak. Answering it properly, with the real running-cost comparison, does more for trust than another paragraph about how cool the units look.
Name the town, not just the trade
The case studies on the page read "Loft bedroom, Woking" and "Open-plan kitchen, Guildford", not "happy customer, five stars". A generic testimonial could be lifted from any trade's website, aircon or otherwise.
A named town a real buyer might recognise reads as a job that actually happened, somewhere near them. That specificity is doing more trust-building than the star rating next to it.
Make the trust marks checkable
F-Gas certification, REFCOM registration, manufacturer accreditation: each one gets its own line explaining what it actually means, not just a badge. Installing refrigerant systems without F-Gas certification is a criminal offence in the UK, which is a stronger sentence than any five-star review.
A badge asks you to trust the badge. A sentence explaining what the badge legally requires asks you to check it, which is the more convincing move when the entire trade has a credibility problem.
What didn't work first
The first version of the cooling scroll effect changed the whole page including the text, and it made the copy nearly unreadable by the halfway point: pale type on a pale ground, exactly when the page most needed to be read.
The fix was separating the background gradient from the text layer entirely, so the room cools around fixed, always-legible copy. The effect had to serve the reading, not compete with it.
The proof
- 80%
- of UK homes reported overheating in summer 2022
- 12p
- an hour to heat a room in winter mode
- £1,995
- published from-price, one room
- 6
- Buyer objections answered before the form
Four times the rate a decade earlier
vs ~49p for a plug-in heater
Most installers require a quote request first
Cost, running cost, planning, noise, looks, cowboys
The market figures are drawn from the research behind the page. The last one is the design: six real objections, each answered on the page before the buyer has to ask.
What this means for your business
If you run a trades or service business, this is the closest of the three concepts to your actual website. Your customers arrive worried about something: cost, whether you're legitimate, whether the last person who did this to them will happen again. A page that answers those doubts in order, before being asked, converts better than one that just lists what you do.
That's not a design flourish. It's the actual job of the page: cost stated plainly, trust made checkable, proof that's specific rather than generic. I build that structure into every trades and service site I make, not just the fictional ones.
If your site currently makes people ask before it answers, that's fixable, and it's usually the first thing worth changing.
Closest service: Brochure website