Client website · live
A repair shop that wanted more local customers.
Tip Top Pinball repairs pinball and arcade machines around Richmond, puts games on location and sells machines. Dan, who owns it, had a Google Sites page and one request: more local customers. I redesigned the site, rewrote it around Henrico, Chesterfield and Ashland, set up his Google Business Profile, and put it live on his own domain.
What Dan got out of it
Three things the old page didn't do.
It says what he does in the first second
The old page buried the offer. The new one opens with it, "we keep Richmond's games in tip top shape," then lists exactly what's covered, puts a request-service button right there, and runs a band of the common faults: won't power on, stuck flippers, dead displays, board faults, blown fuses, full restorations.
Copy written for the places he drives to
Local search needs the page to name the places, so the service copy is written around Henrico, Chesterfield and Ashland. The games he puts on location and the machines he sells got their own pages, so the site covers the whole business and not only the repair side.
A Google Business Profile, and a domain that's his
I set up the Business Profile so he shows up on the map, moved the site off Google Sites onto his own domain, and I maintain it monthly. The address is his, and someone is keeping it current.
The part I'm proudest of
It looks like a real business.
For a small repair shop, that's most of what a website has to do. Someone deciding whether to hand over a machine worth a few thousand dollars needs to feel, on the first screen, that this person knows what they're doing. The dark hero, the plain headline and the band of faults in the shop's red and yellow are all there to say one thing: we've seen your problem before. Dan is a friend. When we talked about the scope he said "I'm putting it in your hands, let's do it," and I wanted the result to look like it deserved that.
Tech stack
Plain files on free hosting.
HTML, CSS and plain JavaScript. Static hosting on GitHub Pages behind his own domain. Web3Forms for the request-service form, so there's no server to babysit. A Google Business Profile for the map, and page structure and copy built for local search.
There's no build step and no CMS, so there's no platform subscription. The whole site is a folder of files. Hosting is free, it loads fast, and any developer could pick it up from Dan tomorrow.