Case study
Plumber.hr — nine services and one that does not exist
Trenchless pipe rehabilitation and 0–24 emergency plumbing in Split. The site had to be serious towards someone standing in water, and at the same time stand apart in a trade where every website looks like the same website. What sets it apart is a page nobody asked for.
The brief
Plumber does trenchless pipe rehabilitation — CIPP lining and epoxy coating — plus drain clearing, diagnostics and 0–24 emergency call-outs. That is two very different customers inside one company. One is planning a building-wide renovation, comparing methods for weeks, and needs something to show the other owners. The other is looking for a phone number at three in the morning and will read nothing.
The site had to serve both without losing either, and it had to look like there is somebody competent behind it — in a trade where trust is built on appearance and everybody looks identical.
Why every site in this trade looks the same
Search for any plumbing service in Croatia and you get the same template: a blue palette, a stock photo of a pipe, a sentence about years of experience, and a service list written in trade jargon. That is not a coincidence. It is what you get when a website is ordered as a line item rather than decided on.
The problem with the template is not aesthetic, it is entirely practical: if you look like everyone else, the customer has nothing left to choose on except price. Standing apart is not decoration — it is the only way the conversation does not open with a discount.
- A dark, industrial palette instead of the category blue
- A cutaway pipe and real work instead of stock photography
- Services written by symptom — "the drain is backing up", not the technical term
Nine services, nine ways in
Every service gets its own page rather than a paragraph on a shared one. The reason is simple: the person searching for a CCTV drain survey and the person searching for an emergency unblocking are not the same person and must not land on the same text. One is researching; the other is dialling.
The pages link to each other by the logic of the problem rather than alphabetically — diagnostics leads to rehabilitation, rehabilitation leads to the comparison of methods. The reader moves towards a decision instead of returning to the menu every time.
- Trenchless rehabilitation, CIPP, epoxy coating, brush coating, spray lining
- Drain clearing, camera inspection, leak and break location
- A standalone epoxy-coating-versus-CIPP comparison, for whoever is choosing
Service 00
Nine services is tidy, competent work. The tenth is the reason anyone remembers this site.
"The Clairvoyant Plumber" is labelled Service 00 and sits in the same menu as all the others. It offers three diagnostic methods in increasing order of seriousness — tarot, bean casting and a crystal ball — each with a completely straight-faced description of how to read it. The ball genuinely works: you ask a question, it answers, and the answer is final until the next click.
The joke is not decoration. The whole page walks towards one sentence near the bottom: most people call only after trying everything else — the chemical from the shop, the advice from Facebook, the neighbour who knows about these things, then the handyman who broke the tiles in the wrong place. Guessing is not a method, not when it is called tarot and not when it is called "let us try it and see". No building manager accepts what the ball says; every one of them accepts a camera inspection report.
That is an argument you cannot make in a serious voice without it sounding like a reproach to the customer. In this form the customer laughs first and reaches the conclusion on their own — and the conclusion leads straight to a service that gets invoiced.
- Three methods, each with straight-faced instructions for interpreting it
- An interactive crystal ball in the browser, with no third-party script
- A price list where everything costs €0.00, with notes parodying legal language
- A conclusion that routes to camera inspection and trenchless rehabilitation
- An FAQ that says outright the page is a joke and everything else is not
Where the line is
Humour in a serious trade is a risk and should be treated as one. A site that jokes about somebody else’s broken pipe is offensive. A site that jokes about itself offends nobody.
So Service 00 never mocks the customer who tried to fix it themselves. The target of the joke is guessing as a method, never the person who guessed. And that is why the FAQ carries the literal question "Is this serious?" with the answer "No. This page is a joke. Everything else on plumber.hr is serious."
Without that sentence the same page would be a risk to trust rather than evidence of it. The difference between witty and unserious is one paragraph of text — and it has to be there.
How it is built
Static HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with PHP only for the enquiry form. There is no CMS to maintain and no database that can fall over at three in the morning — which for a 0–24 service is an argument, not a saving.
The content is in the HTML before any script runs, so search engines and AI crawlers get it immediately. Structured data covers the business, the services, the navigation and the FAQs — including the ones on Service 00, because if something is marked up it has to be described accurately, joke or not.
- The 0–24 call button within reach on every screen, laid out for the phone first
- Structured data for the business, services, navigation and FAQs
- Sitemap, robots and a machine-readable site description
- WebP images; the site opens on mobile data
What this is, and what it is not
The site is live at plumber.hr. There is no number here about calls or search positions, because I did not measure them — and a number nobody measured is marketing, not a result.
What can be claimed is this: in a trade full of identical websites, the client has one that cannot be mistaken for any other, and one piece of content people pass on without being asked to. In a local service business, where work arrives by recommendation, that is not a small thing.
Working in a trade where everybody looks the same?