Six concept sites in a week

I spent a week building six speculative marketing sites for six different industries: an electrician, a plumber, a landscape designer, a home care provider, a swim school, and an aerospace engineering firm. None of them are real clients. All of them are live on the portfolio under Concepts.

Why? Two reasons. First, “shows range” is much more legible when you can point at six different examples in six different verticals, rather than waving vaguely at a single client roster. Second, every build clarifies what you already know and exposes what you don’t.

Here is what stuck.

What carries across

The design system was the same on all six. The same type scale, the same five-step grey ramp, the same hover behaviour on cards, the same nav pattern. Once that is in place, the actual visual work each site needs is small: choose two brand colours, pick an evocative image direction, write the copy in the voice of the industry.

Most of the layout components carried straight across too. A hero with a phone call CTA. A “what we do” three-up. A trust band. A services strip. A testimonial. A contact section. That is the marketing-site skeleton, and it does not care whether you are selling rewires or live-in care.

What does not

Tone of voice. The electrician site reads in trade language: “Domestic. Commercial. Certified.” The care provider moves at a completely different pace: “Care that comes home to you.” The plumber leans on dry humour (“On call. On time. On the level.”). The aerospace firm is technical and precise. Each tone implies different copy density, different button labels, different image energy.

The other surprise: imagery is more vertical-specific than I expected. Stock photography of a happy plumber or a happy electrician reads as cliche immediately. Photography for a swim school or a home care provider, by contrast, can lean on emotional stock and feel right. So for trades I leaned on illustrative iconography, and for care and learning I trusted photography.

Why it matters for prospects

If you run a business in one of those six industries, the demo on the portfolio is the closest version of “your site, with your name on it” I can show without speculating. The components are battle-tested across the others. The design system has been pushed in six directions and held up. Most of the production work is already done.

That cuts cost. That cuts timeline. And it lets the conversation start at “which bits do you want changed?” rather than “what do you want?”. For a small business owner without months to give a brief, that is the difference between getting a site shipped this quarter and never quite finding the time.