Quoting jobs, doing the work and answering the phone already fill the working day. A website that needs regular attention from you becomes a second job, and it's one most trade business owners never wanted in the first place.

What actually goes out of date on a trade website

A website is not something you write once and leave. Certain parts of it drift out of date on their own timetable, whether or not anyone notices straight away.

• The list of areas you cover, which is wrong the moment you start taking jobs further out than it says
• A competent person scheme registration number, which stops matching the scheme's own record if it lapses or changes
• Photographs of finished jobs stay on a phone unless someone puts them on the site

The full detail on why areas covered is the part that ages fastest is on Areas Covered, and the Page That Is Wrong the Moment the Van Goes Further.

Reading this without becoming the maintenance person

The pages here are written to be read one at a time, in whatever order answers the question you actually have. None of them assume you're about to learn how a content management system works or spend an evening editing HTML.

Who writes these pages and why is covered on the About page.

A trade website has to carry a fixed set of information whatever the trade: a name, a way to get in touch, the work carried out, the areas it's carried out in, and something to show for past jobs. Leave one of those off and a visitor is left guessing, and a visitor who has to guess usually moves on to the next search result instead.

What a trade website has to carry

• The business name and the trade it covers
• A phone number and an email address that both work
• The areas the business actually works in.
• Any scheme registrations held, named accurately
• Photographs of completed work, ideally before and after the same job

None of these is optional in the sense that a website without one is still doing its job. A phone number that's out of date isn't a smaller version of a working phone number, it's a page that doesn't do what it's there to do.

What goes out of date first

The list of areas covered ages faster than anything else on a trade website, because the business keeps taking on work further out while the page describing its range stays exactly as written the day it went up. The areas covered page on a site is often the first thing to fall behind what the business is actually doing.

Photographs age more slowly, but they still date: a kitchen fitted five years ago looks like a kitchen fitted five years ago, and a visitor comparing it to more recent work elsewhere will notice. Phone numbers change when a business changes provider. A scheme registration number stops being current the moment the registration lapses, whatever the website still says.

What a scheme registration lets you say

A scheme registration lets you state that you're registered with the body that issues it, and nothing beyond that. Gas Safe Register, NICEIC, NAPIT and similar bodies keep their own record of who is currently registered, and that record is what a customer can check the claim against.

Registration is a status held at a point in time, checked by the body itself. A website that writes about a registration as though it covers every job the business does is saying more than the registration supports, and that gap is exactly what a visitor checking the number against the body's own register will find.

Each page here is written to answer one question in full. If you land on a single page from a search, you should be able to read it, get the answer, and stop there, without needing to have read anything else on the site first.

Why the pages don't repeat each other

A page about scheme wording does not also explain areas covered, and a page about areas covered does not repeat what a Gas Safe Register number lets you say. Where a topic genuinely belongs on another page, it is named and linked rather than summarised again, so a point is only ever made once.

That's why you'll sometimes see a short mention of a topic with a link next to it. The Areas Covered, and the Page That Is Wrong the Moment the Van Goes Further page is one example: it comes up on several pages in passing, but the full answer sits only there.

What the pages are for

Some pages are checklists: what a website needs to carry, what a scheme registration lets you say. Some are explainers that walk through one question end to end. Others, like About, give background on the site itself. None of them assume you've read the others first.