Your van is the advert you pay for once and then show to thousands of people. It sits outside jobs all day, it queues at the same lights as everybody else, and it parks on streets where your next customer lives.
It is also close to permanent. Getting it wrong means either living with it or paying to have it stripped and redone. So it is worth five minutes of thought before the vinyl goes on.
The only test that matters
Somebody is behind you at a junction. They have about four seconds, they are not writing anything down, and they are going to look you up later or not at all.
Everything below comes back to that. Four seconds, no pen.
What earns its place
What you actually do
Not just the business name. “Hartley Services Ltd” tells a stranger nothing. “Hartley – Boiler Repairs & Servicing” tells them everything in the same glance. Plenty of vans have a beautiful logo and no clue what the business does.
One phone number, big
The one you actually answer. Not the office line that goes to voicemail, not two numbers so people have to choose. Make it the largest thing after the trade itself.
Your website address
This is the one people underestimate, and it is covered properly below.
An email address on your own domain
Also covered below, because it is the detail that quietly costs people work.
The area you cover
“Slough & surrounding areas” saves you calls from forty miles away and reassures the person two streets over that you are local.
One proof mark, if you have it
Gas Safe, NICEIC, NAPIT. One badge that means something beats five that nobody recognises.
Why the website address matters more than people expect
Nobody rings a moving van. What actually happens is that somebody notices you, remembers roughly who you were, and looks you up that evening when the problem is still on their mind.
If there is a web address on the van, that search is easy and it lands on you. If there is not, they type your trade and their town into Google and land on whoever ranks – which might be you, but is more likely to be three competitors and a directory.
The address needs to be short enough to read at thirty miles an hour. Drop the www. Keep it to something a person can hold in their head for the length of a traffic light. If your domain is long or hard to spell, that is worth fixing before you commit it to vinyl.
One thing worth checking first: make sure the site is actually finished. A van sending people to a page that says “coming soon” is worse than a van with no address at all.
Why a Gmail address on a van costs you work
This is the detail almost nobody thinks about, and it is visible to every single person who reads your van.
An address like daveplumbing@gmail.com on the side of a vehicle says one thing to a certain kind of customer: this is a bloke with a van rather than a business. That may be completely unfair – you might be better than every firm in town – but you are being judged in four seconds at a junction, and people judge on the signals available.
Compare it with dave@daveplumbing.co.uk. Same person, same work, same van. The second one reads as a business that intends to still be here next year.
It matters most exactly where the money is. Letting agents, property managers, landlords and commercial clients deal with contractors constantly, and a free email address is the sort of thing that gets you quietly left off a list. Nobody tells you that is why.
It is also the cheapest credibility you can buy
Here is the part people do not realise: if you own a domain for your website, the email addresses come with it. It is usually included, or a few pounds a month. You are not buying a new product, you are using something you already have.
And you actually own it
A free address lives on somebody else’s platform under rules you do not control. An address on your own domain is yours, it moves with you if you change provider, and it can be handed to staff as the business grows. You can read more about why owning the domain matters in what happens when your web designer disappears.
What to leave off
A list of every service you offer. Twelve lines of eight-point text is twelve lines nobody reads. Three words about what you do beats a paragraph.
Social media handles. Nobody is typing an Instagram handle from a moving vehicle. Put the website on there and let the site link to your profiles.
A QR code. On a shop window, fine. On a vehicle that is either moving or parked at a kerb, nobody is standing in the road to scan it.
Your home address. If you work from home, the town is enough. There is no upside to advertising where your tools sleep.
Script fonts and drop shadows. If it cannot be read at a glance in poor light, it is decoration rather than signage.
Where it goes on the van
The rear doors do the most work. That is the surface sitting in front of somebody at every set of lights, at eye level, for a minute at a time. Phone number and web address belong there, large.
The sides are seen at speed or when parked, so they suit the trade, the name and the area. The bonnet and cab doors are for the logo, not information.
Sort this out before the vinyl goes on
The order most people do it in is: get the van signwritten, then think about a website later. That is backwards, and it is expensive.
Register the domain first. Get the email addresses working on it. Get the site live. Then send the signwriter the final wording, once, and never touch it again. Doing it the other way round means either a van that points nowhere for six months, or paying to redo a panel because the address changed.
If you are at that stage
If you are booking signwriting in the next few weeks and have not sorted the domain and email yet, that is the right time to talk. We register the domain in your name, set up the addresses on it, and build the site – so the wording you hand the signwriter is final.
Where you work matters as much as what you put on the van — see the trades most in demand between Slough and West London.
Our prices are published and our website design for tradesmen page explains what is included. If you would rather just ask, tell us your trade and your area and we will come back with a plan and a price. If you have not got a listing on Google yet either, start with getting your business on Google Maps, because it is free and it takes twenty minutes.