How a landscaping website shows work in every season

For your trade 5 min read

Every photograph on a landscaping site was taken in July. How to show your work, your calendar and your dormant months so the page reads true all year.

It is the second week of February and somebody is sitting with a cup of tea deciding whether to call you about their back garden. Every photograph on your website was taken in early July. Full color, deep green, a lawn at its absolute best. They look out of the window at frozen mud and they cannot connect the two things at all.

Your work changes four times a year. A website that only ever shows one of those four is telling three quarters of a story.

Put the month on the photograph

A photograph of a garden with no date is a photograph of a garden that might be anywhere and might be years old. A photograph captioned "planted late April, photographed the first week of June" is checkable, and it carries a timescale, which is the thing the reader is trying to work out.

So caption them with the month and the year, and stop worrying about whether a picture taken in October is less attractive than one taken in June. An October photograph, dated, tells somebody what their garden will look like in October, and that is a question they have.

Show the same garden twice, a year apart

The single most useful thing on a landscaping website is a before, an after, and a same-time-next-year.

New planting looks thin. Everybody knows this and nobody quite believes it until they see it. Two photographs of the same bed, one taken the week you finished and one taken the following summer, answer the doubt that stops people spending money on plants: that they are paying for something that will look sparse for a season and then possibly die.

You need one client and one calendar reminder to make this. It takes a year to get the second photograph, which is exactly why almost nobody has it.

Say what you are booking right now

Put one line near the top of the page and change it four times a year. What you are quoting for at the moment. What is full. What starts next month.

"Booking spring clean-ups from mid-March. Design work for summer, two slots left. Mowing rounds are full until the autumn." That line does more work than any amount of description, because it answers the actual question, which is not "are you good" but "can I have you, and when".

The reason so few sites have it is that it needs changing several times a year and most sites are built to be finished. Yours should not be.

Write the services list the way the year runs

Most services lists are alphabetical or in whatever order they occurred to whoever built the page. Yours should run in the order the year runs, because that is the order your customer experiences it.

Spring clean-up and bed edging. Irrigation start-up. Mowing and maintenance through the summer. Planting in the shoulder seasons. Leaf clearance. Irrigation blow-out before the first hard freeze. Snow, if you do snow. Written that way, a reader in February can see where they are in the list and what is coming, and it becomes obvious what to call you about now rather than in three months.

Say what happens in the months you are not mowing

Somebody looking at your site in January wants to know whether you exist in January.

There are three honest answers and all of them are fine. You take on snow and winter work, and you should say so clearly because most of your competitors bury it. Or you do design and quoting through the winter for spring installation, which is genuinely useful to know because it means somebody can start the conversation now. Or you shut down between November and March and you would rather people called in the spring, which is a perfectly good business and worth stating so nobody sits on an unanswered inquiry for two weeks.

The only bad answer is silence, because silence reads as gone.

Say what happens if a plant dies

Plants die. Some die because of the winter, some because they were never watered, some for no reason anybody can determine.

Whatever your actual position is, write it down. Whether you replace anything, for how long, and what falls outside it. If your answer is that you do not warrant plant material at all but you will always come and look, write that. A clear position that is less generous than the reader hoped still settles the question. An unwritten position turns into an argument in the following spring, which costs more than the plant did.

Keep it current without rebuilding it

Nearly everything above is a small edit. A new line about what you are booking. Four fresh photographs with dates on them. A sentence about winter, added in October and removed in March.

None of that needs a new website. Twenty minutes of changes a few times a year is the difference between a page that reads as this season's and one that announces it stopped in a summer some while ago.

A short checklist

Every photograph captioned with the month and the year it was taken
At least one job shown a full year after it was finished
One line at the top saying what you are booking now, changed four times a year
Services listed in calendar order rather than alphabetically
A sentence on what you do between November and March
Your position on plant replacement, written down
Photographs from at least three different seasons, not only high summer

Questions people ask

How often should a landscaping website be updated

Four times a year is plenty. One line about what you are booking, and a few new dated photographs each season.

Should I show gardens in winter

Yes, if they are dated. A bed photographed in November tells somebody what their money looks like in November, and they will find out eventually either way.

Do I need a portfolio page or is a gallery enough

A gallery of unlabeled photographs is decoration. Six jobs with a line each saying what was done, when, and roughly how long it took is a portfolio.

What if I have only worked on a handful of gardens

Show the handful and say so. Three jobs described honestly read better than thirty photographs a reader suspects are not yours.

Should I list prices for landscaping work

A starting figure for the two or three jobs you do most often, and a sentence about what changes it. Nobody expects a full quote from a web page.

How do I get inquiries in the off season

Say on the page what you are doing in the off season. Design, quoting and planning work all happen months before the ground is ready, and people cannot ask for something the site does not mention.