What a crane and rigging company's website needs.

The person on your website is usually a project manager with a lift on the schedule, and before they call, they want to know whether you have a crane that can make the pick on their date.

Before I built websites, I built crane trucks at Commercial Truck Equipment and Crane Works, from schematics I drew myself, and I serviced crane gear for rigging companies. That is where I learned what a dispatcher needs to know before a crane leaves the yard. Most crane company websites I look at answer very little of it.

Who books the lift.

Your customer is a general contractor or the project manager on their job. They have a load to set and a date to set it on, and they are often looking at a few crane companies on the same morning.

They are reading on a phone in a site trailer or at a desk with the schedule open, and they want answers before they pick up the phone. If your website makes them call to find out whether you have a big enough crane, they will call the company whose website shows it.

Repeat work helps less than most owners think. Project managers move between companies and new ones start on every job, and the first thing a new one does with your name is look it up.

Some of your work also comes through an engineer or a lift planner working for the contractor, and they read the same pages looking for the same numbers.

Put the fleet list on the page.

The fleet list is the most important page on a crane company's website, and on most of the sites I see, it is a PDF.

A PDF is hard to read on a phone. The project manager has to pinch and scroll sideways to find the capacity column, and the copy somebody saved in 2019 keeps getting forwarded after you have sold two of the cranes on it.

Put each crane on the page as text instead, with these details:

• The type, like a boom truck or an all terrain crane.
• The capacity, in tonnes or tons, whichever your customers use.
• The reach, meaning the main boom length, plus the jib if it has one.
• Whether it goes out with your operator or as a bare rental.
• A link to the load chart.

A line that reads "40 tonne boom truck, 38 m of reach, operated" tells a project manager more than any photo does. When you sell a crane or buy one, the page takes five minutes to change.

If you rent out rigging gear, like spreader bars or man baskets, give it its own page and list it the same way, with the capacity on each piece.

Load charts can stay as PDFs. They are long documents from the manufacturer, and the person who wants one is planning the lift at a desk. Link each chart from its crane so nobody has to email the office for it.

A form that asks what dispatch asks.

Most crane company contact forms ask for a name and a message. That gets you "need a crane next Tuesday, call me", and dispatch spends the call asking the questions the form could have asked.

Call the form Request a lift, and ask what a dispatcher asks:

• The lift date, and how long the crane is needed on site.
• The site address, or the legal land location for a lease site.
• The load weight, including the rigging.
• The radius, meaning how far the load sits from where the crane sets up, and how high it has to go.
• Site access, meaning the ground the crane sets up on and the room for its outriggers.
• Power lines or anything else overhead.
• A place to upload a site photo or a drawing.

With those answers, dispatch can pick the crane and price the job from the form, and the call back is a booking. Keep the phone number at the top of every page as well, because some lifts get booked at 6 am from a truck, and nobody fills in a form for those.

Your safety record and where you work.

A general contractor answers for every company on their site, so they check your safety record before they book you.

In Alberta, that starts with the Certificate of Recognition (COR). The province issues it jointly with a certifying partner, which for construction is the Alberta Construction Safety Association, once the employer passes an audit of its health and safety program. Employers with fewer than 10 workers can get a SECOR, the small employer version. A COR is valid for three years, with a maintenance audit in each of the two years after the first one.

The province keeps a public list of employers with a COR, updated daily, with each employer's COR number and expiry date under its legal name. Put your number and expiry date on your website under that same legal name, so a careful contractor can check it in a minute. Change the date when you renew.

Say who runs the cranes, too. In Alberta, crane and hoisting equipment operator is a compulsory certification trade, so your operators need a certificate or have to be registered apprentices. On US construction sites, OSHA requires crane operators to be certified or licensed, and one way is through an accredited testing organization such as NCCCO. Your operators' tickets are a big part of why a contractor trusts you on their site, so say what they hold.

Then list the towns and regions you work in by name, and say whether you travel farther for a bigger lift. A project manager in Grande Prairie should not have to call to find out whether you go there.

Real lifts and a Google Business Profile for the yard.

Put up photos of your cranes on real jobs, with a line under each one saying what it lifted and which crane did it, like a rooftop unit set with the 40 tonne. Ask the contractor before you post a photo of their site. A project manager learns more from those than from stock photos of somebody else's crane at sunset. Photos of your yard and your shop help too, because a contractor wants to see that the equipment is looked after.

Then set up a Google Business Profile, the box with your hours and reviews that shows on Google Maps and beside search results. Google's rule for the address is plain: if customers come to your yard, show the address. If they never do, Google says to remove the address and set a service area instead, and if you do both, you enter both.

Your profile can list up to 20 service areas, and Google says the whole area should stay within about two hours' drive of where you are based. If you go farther for big lifts, say so on your website, where there is no limit.

Add photos of the yard and the fleet to your profile, and ask the project managers you work with for a review after a job goes well.

None of this needs a big website. A crane company needs a fleet page, a lift request form, a safety page and a page of real lifts, and every one of them has to read on a phone. That is the kind of site I build on website design for contractors, with a maintenance plan, so the fleet page changes when the fleet does. Crane and rigging sits with the other trades I know from the inside on the industries page.