In short and in plain language
This article is about the website of painters in winter.
When it gets cold, work on the outside walls ends. Then indoor work counts. But many websites still show the outside walls.
Paint, wallpaper, floors and drywall need pages of their own. Reorder your home page without a rebuild.
Private clients ask about dust, furniture and how long it takes. And if they can stay at home.
Collect dates for winter in the autumn. For that the form needs a field for the time they want.
We build websites for painters at a fixed price.
In September there are still scaffolds on the facades, and the office is holding enquiries for outdoor work that is meant to be finished by the end of October. Six weeks later the picture is a different one. For the year 2025 the German Meteorological Service counted 82.9 frost days as the area mean for Germany (DWD), and with the first of them, predictable work on the facade comes to an end. What remains is the interior business: paint, wallpaper, flooring, drywall. On many trade websites, October still says exactly what May said - even though around 59 percent of the work takes place indoors anyway (Bundesverband Farbe Gestaltung Bautenschutz). This article describes which pages the indoor season needs, in which order they should appear and how appointments for January and February can be collected as early as autumn.
Key takeaways
- Around 59 percent of the work is carried out indoors, roughly 26 percent on the building envelope (Bundesverband Farbe Gestaltung Bautenschutz). Many websites show the opposite ratio, because facade photographs simply look better.
- The German Meteorological Service counted 82.9 frost days as the area mean for 2025 (DWD); across 1991 to 2020 the average is 81.2 (own calculation from the same series). The outdoor season does not end on a fixed date, but predictably enough to plan around.
- Classic painting work accounts for 29.9 percent of turnover, facade coatings for 16.5 percent and wallpapering for 11.3 percent (Bundesverband Farbe Gestaltung Bautenschutz). Each of these services deserves a page of its own.
- In businesses with fewer than four employees, private clients make up over 71 percent of the customer base (Bundesverband Farbe Gestaltung Bautenschutz). Before a home renovation they ask about dust protection, moving furniture, the time per room and whether they can stay.
- In 2026 the average order lead time in the smallest businesses was 9.4 weeks (Bundesverband Farbe Gestaltung Bautenschutz). Anyone who wants work in January collects the appointments in October, which means the form needs a field for the preferred period.
What actually changes in October
The line between the outdoor and the indoor season is not a date in the calendar but a sequence of nights. According to the definition used by the German Meteorological Service, a frost day is a day on which the minimum air temperature falls below freezing point (DWD). As the area mean for Germany there were 82.9 such days in 2025 (DWD); across the 30 years from 1991 to 2020 the average is 81.2 (own calculation from the same series). They are not spread evenly across the year but cluster in the winter half. Manufacturers state minimum temperatures for facade coatings in their application notes; where those are no longer reliably reached, the work moves indoors or into the following spring. The business knows this. The website, as a rule, does not.
Economically, interior work carries the larger share in any case. According to the annual economic survey of the Bundesverband Farbe Gestaltung Bautenschutz, around 59 percent of the work takes place indoors and roughly 26 percent consists of painting on the building envelope (Bundesverband Farbe Gestaltung Bautenschutz). Within the turnover shares, classic painting work accounts for 29.9 percent, facade coatings for 16.5 percent and wallpapering for 11.3 percent (Bundesverband Farbe Gestaltung Bautenschutz). Around 86 percent of the businesses surveyed work on existing buildings (Bundesverband Farbe Gestaltung Bautenschutz), that is, in buildings already in use. The winter half is therefore not an emergency programme but the normal case, only one that photographs less well.
Websites rarely reflect this. At the top there is a facade photograph from July, below it a combined page headed Services, and somewhere in the third line the words interior painting appear. Anyone who wants a flat painted in November finds nothing there that matches the question. For a painting business that treats a website for painters and decorators as a tool rather than a business card, this is a job with manageable effort: it is not about new technology, but about order, headings and four to six pages of text.
| What triggers the enquiry | Summer half | Winter half |
|---|---|---|
| Trigger | Visible damage to the facade, scaffolding next door, a renovation due on the building | A moving date, a change of tenant, a room that should be ready before Christmas |
| Who decides | Owner, property manager or owners association, often with several parties involved | As a rule one person or one couple living in the flat |
| What sets the date | Scaffolding, weather, drying times outdoors | Whether the flat stays usable, furniture, holidays, school breaks |
| First question | What does a square metre of facade cost | How long will the flat be unusable |
| What the website has to deliver | Reference photographs, notes on scaffolding, a contact for the property manager | A separate page per interior service with sequence, duration, dust protection and clearing up |
The right-hand column is the whole difference. It does not call for a different website, but for different content in a different place. Anyone who works through that column has a page in October that suits the season, and in March the same page back in its old order.
The service pages that carry the winter half
A combined page headed Services with twelve bullet points answers no concrete question at all. It is a table of contents without contents. Someone who wants a flat painted is not searching for services but for what they intend to do: paint a flat, strip wallpaper, paint over woodchip, lay flooring, fill a ceiling. Each of these intentions deserves its own page with its own heading, its own sequence of steps and its own answer to the question of duration and price range.
The ratio of turnover between renovation and new-build projects, by contrast, remains relatively constant - around 86 percent of the painting and decorating businesses surveyed now work on existing buildings.
Existing buildings, as a rule, means occupied buildings. The job takes place in a room where someone lives, works or stores goods, and not on scaffolding in front of an empty new build. That is why, in the winter half, the enquiry is decided less often by the description of the service than by the question of how the business handles an occupied room. That is exactly where a website can take work off the desk, provided it has a page of its own for each interior service. Four to six pages are usually enough for the indoor season. Painting a flat or a house tends to come first, because that intention is formulated most often. Wallpapering and wallpaper removal belong on a second page, floor coverings on a third, drywall and filling work on a fourth. A business that offers lacquer work on doors, frames and radiators gains a fifth, which is typically in demand in winter because it can be done room by room. A sixth page can cover mould remediation or internal insulation, provided the business genuinely carries that out.
Each of these pages needs the same six building blocks: a heading that repeats the reader's intention; two paragraphs describing the sequence from the first appointment to the final clean; a list of what the business brings and what the customer prepares; an honest statement on the time per room; two or three photographs from a real interior; and a route to an enquiry that is not labelled Contact but matches the service. More is not needed, less is not enough. Around 500 to 800 words per page is the right size.
Why the combined page is not enough
What private clients want to know before a home renovation
In businesses with fewer than four employees, private clients dominate the customer base with a share of over 71 percent (Bundesverband Farbe Gestaltung Bautenschutz). These customers do not compare tender documents. They stand in their own living room, work out in their head where the furniture is supposed to go, and wonder whether they will have to sleep at their parents' place for a week. Their concerns are organisational, not technical. And these are exactly the concerns a typical trade website leaves unanswered, because it talks about execution rather than about living in the place.
A business that answers these questions on the service page saves itself half the callbacks and receives enquiries that are already half decided. The answers cost nothing: every journeyman in the business knows them, they are simply not written down anywhere. Once noted, they can be reused on every service page and attached to the quotation.
The form of the answer matters. Not we work cleanly, but how cleanly the work is done: which sheeting, which masking tape, which vacuum, who moves the furniture and who puts it back. Not short construction time, but a figure with a range and a condition. The list below contains the points that are usually raised before a home renovation and belong on every interior page.
- Dust protection: which surfaces are covered, which doors are taped up, whether a dust wall is set up, whether sanding is done with extraction.
- Furniture: who moves it to the middle of the room, who carries it out, what the customer has to empty themselves (cupboards, shelves, window sills).
- Time per room: a range in days for a room of usual size, separated into painting, stripping wallpaper and filling the substrate.
- Staying in the flat: whether it can be used during the work, which rooms are closed off and when, from when things can be put back.
- Odour and drying: how long ventilation is needed, which products are used in an occupied room, what applies with children and pets.
- Access: handing over the key, whether someone has to be present, arrangements with neighbours and the property manager, working hours in an apartment block.
- Completion: final clean, disposal of old coverings and packaging, handover with a record, remedial work on remaining points.
- Costs: what is billed as a lump sum, what is measured on site, how surprises in the substrate are handled.
The last point is uncomfortable and effective at the same time. Whether and how price ranges should appear on the website is a decision of its own; the arguments for and against are set out in the article on showing prices on a trade website. For private clients a second topic comes into play in the winter half: the tax deductibility of labour and travel costs. How to mention that on the website without slipping into tax advice is described in the article on tax relief for trade services on the website.
Reordering the homepage without rebuilding it
A widespread misconception is that a seasonal website means two websites. It means one website with two orders. The homepage consists of sections, and sections can be moved in almost any content management system. Anyone who in October drags the block with the interior services above the facade block, swaps the header image for an interior shot and changes the heading from facade renovation in the district to painting flats in the district has finished the changeover in under an hour.
What matters is that no address disappears in the process. The facade page stays online, it merely moves down. Deleting it in winter and creating it again in spring loses the links that have pointed to it over the years and starts from zero each time. Moving is allowed, removing is not. The following order has proven itself in practice for the period from October to March.
- Header area with an interior shot, a heading that names the interior service and the town, and a button for an appointment enquiry.
- A short notice line saying that appointments for January and February are being allocated now - one sentence, not a banner.
- The four to six interior services as tiles, each with one sentence and a link to its own page.
- Two or three interior references with property type, scope and duration, without customer names.
- The section on sequence and dust protection, because it anticipates a recurring question.
- The facade block with a note that appointments for the spring can already be pencilled in.
- Contact area with telephone number, form and the hours when someone actually picks up.
Two orders, one calendar entry
Photographs from indoors are different photographs
Facade photographs are forgiving: daylight, distance, clear edges, a before and an after that anyone can recognise. Interior photographs are the opposite. The room is narrow, the light comes from two sources with different colours, and freshly painted white looks on the photograph like the old white. That is why many painting business websites hold dozens of facade photographs and three blurred interior shots, and why the site looks empty in winter, although that is exactly when the business has plenty to show.
The effort is smaller than expected once the rules are set in advance. It is not about a camera, but about the position, the light and the ability to repeat the same framing. Photographing before and after from the same corner already secures half the effect. The basics are set out in the article on phone photos for trade websites; the particularities of the interior are summarised in the table below.
| Feature | Facade photograph | Interior photograph |
|---|---|---|
| Light | Daylight, preferably an overcast sky, no direct backlight | Two light colours mix; switch off the ceiling light and work with daylight |
| Position | Distance from the street, the whole building in frame | From the corner of the room, camera at chest height, keeping edges straight |
| Framing | The whole property, neighbouring buildings excluded | A section of wall with the transition to ceiling and floor, not the whole room |
| Before and after | Weeks apart, and the weather changes | Days apart, the same position is decisive and easy to hit |
| Privacy | Make house numbers and number plates unrecognisable | Clear personal items, photographs and post out of the frame beforehand |
| Number | Two or three photographs per property are enough | Four to six per property, because a single section says little |
A business that notes these rules once and hands them to its fitters collects enough material over a single winter for all its interior service pages. Two shots per completed job are enough, provided they come from the same corner. One folder per property, a short code in the file name, done.
Photographs that carry the winter
Collecting January appointments as early as autumn
Since 2024 the buffer in the order books has stayed at a consistently low level of around 11 weeks, and in 2026 the average order lead time in the smallest businesses was 9.4 weeks (Bundesverband Farbe Gestaltung Bautenschutz). As the main reason for the cautious outlook, 74 percent of the owners surveyed named the difficult order situation in private client business (Bundesverband Farbe Gestaltung Bautenschutz). Counted in weeks that means: anyone who wants work in January has to receive the enquiry in October or November. The website is the one tool in the business that can ask for it around the clock.
One additional field in the enquiry form is enough: the preferred period, offered as a choice of months rather than as a free date. A private client enquiring in October usually does not want an appointment straight away but wants to know whether it is possible at all. A field with four months to choose from turns a non-committal question into a plannable enquiry. How many fields a trade form can carry and how appointment requests are organised cleanly is set out in the article on organising appointments via the website.
{
"asOf": "2026-10-01",
"season": "indoor",
"homepage": {
"serviceOrder": [
"painting-a-flat",
"wallpapering",
"floor-coverings",
"drywall-and-filling",
"facade-and-exterior-coating"
],
"noticeLine": "Appointments for January and February are being allocated now"
},
"form": {
"requiredFields": ["propertyType", "roomCount", "preferredPeriod", "occupied"],
"preferredPeriod": ["November", "December", "January", "February"]
},
"switchBackOn": "2027-03-15",
"responsible": "contact@example-painter.invalid"
}A file like that is not a program but a note that stops the changeover from being reinvented next year. More important than the format is that incoming enquiries actually arrive. Form emails from trade businesses end up in the spam folder more often than assumed, because the sender used by the website does not match the domain of the business. Why that happens and how it can be fixed is set out in the article on why trade enquiry emails end up in spam. An appointment request that nobody reads is more expensive than no form at all.
Preferred period, not a fixed date
Four months to choose from, no date entry. The customer does not have to commit, and the business still receives a plannable answer and can sort the enquiries by month.
Property type and number of rooms
Flat, house, office or stairwell, plus the number of rooms. Two fields that place the scope roughly and shorten the follow-up call from ten minutes to three.
Allow a photo of the room
An optional field for a photograph. Seeing the substrate in advance reveals woodchip, damaged plaster or old wallpaper and allows a sounder estimate instead of two site visits.
A confirmation that says something
The automatic reply names the next step and a period for the response. A plain thank you for your enquiry typically produces a second phone call on the same day.
Four more fields, one more sentence in the confirmation: that is the whole rebuild. It only works if it is in place in October and not in January, when the calendar is already empty.
Search terms that read differently in winter
Rewriting the facade page for the indoor season loses both. The terms private clients search with in winter differ from the summer terms, but they belong on other pages, not on the same ones. Facade, external wall insulation and exterior coating stay where they are. Alongside them, pages appear for the intentions formulated in the winter half. And those intentions are strikingly concrete.
A private client's typical search names an activity, an object and a place. It is not painter, but have a flat painted plus a town name, paint over woodchip wallpaper, cost of stripping wallpaper, have a ceiling filled, smoothing walls in an old building. These formulations belong in headings and in the first two sentences of the page in question, not in a keyword list at the foot of the page. How to find such terms for your own catchment area without guessing is described in the article on finding local search terms for trades.
- One intention per page: painting a flat, stripping wallpaper, laying flooring, filling a ceiling, lacquering doors.
- The town appears in the page heading, not only in the legal notice and not in every subheading.
- The cost question is addressed on the page itself, even if the answer is a range with a condition.
- Technical terms sit next to everyday language: emulsion coating in brackets after painting walls, not instead of it.
- Every page links to two related pages, so that a visitor gets from wallpaper to flooring without going back.
- The facade pages stay online unchanged and are sorted back to the top in spring.
94 percent of trade businesses run a website of their own, and 88 percent additionally use online directories (Bitkom). The difference between businesses therefore no longer arises from having a site at all, but from whether that site matches the visitor's intention. In the winter half, that is a different intention from the summer.
What the business can handle itself in October
The greater part of this work is not website work but memory work. The details on dust protection, moving furniture and time per room already exist in the business, they are simply not recorded in any document. Two evenings spent writing them out produce the text for four service pages. Everything after that, from building the pages to ordering them and adding photographs, takes half a day.
It pays to do the collection together with a journeyman who hears the customers' questions every day. As a rule, three or four points come up that nobody in the office thinks of: the question of parking for the van, the question of power in the stairwell, the question of whether work happens on Saturdays. These are exactly the points that separate a page that informs from a page that creates trust.
- Name the four to six interior services the business actually carries out in the winter half, not the ones in the catalogue.
- Set a time per room as a range for each service and note the condition attached to it (substrate, number of coats, furniture).
- Write out the sequence from the first appointment to the final clean in eight to ten sentences, in the language used on the phone.
- Pick two before-and-after pairs per service from the last two winters, or schedule the photography for the coming weeks.
- Extend the enquiry form by preferred period, property type and number of rooms, and receive the confirmation email once yourself.
- Reorder the homepage and write both orders down, so that the switch in March takes twenty minutes.
A business that works through these six points does not have a new website, but a website that says something different in October from what it says in May. That is the whole difference, and it is usually available within two weeks.
Collect what is known
Two evenings with a journeyman: which interior services are actually carried out in winter, which questions private clients regularly ask, which answers the business gives on the phone today. Everything is written down, nothing is sorted yet.
Write the pages
One page per service with heading, sequence, preparation, time per room and a route to an enquiry. 500 to 800 words are enough. The facade pages stay untouched, they are only moved later.
Add photographs
Four to six interior shots per service, before and after from the same corner. Clear personal items out of the frame beforehand and obtain the customer's written approval, even where no name is mentioned.
Switch over and set the date
Bring the homepage into the interior order, extend the form fields, check the confirmation email. Then two calendar entries: early October for the switch there, mid-March for the switch back.
Two evenings with a journeyman: which interior services are actually carried out in winter, which questions private clients regularly ask, which answers the business gives on the phone today. Everything is written down, nothing is sorted yet.
One page per service with heading, sequence, preparation, time per room and a route to an enquiry. 500 to 800 words are enough. The facade pages stay untouched, they are only moved later.
Four to six interior shots per service, before and after from the same corner. Clear personal items out of the frame beforehand and obtain the customer's written approval, even where no name is mentioned.
Bring the homepage into the interior order, extend the form fields, check the confirmation email. Then two calendar entries: early October for the switch there, mid-March for the switch back.
The schedule up to the first frost
The timing of this work is not arbitrary. It has to be finished before the first interior enquiries come in, and those arrive with the first cold weekend. Counting back the order lead time of around 11 weeks (Bundesverband Farbe Gestaltung Bautenschutz), the end of September emerges as a sensible start. The effort is spread unevenly: the writing takes the longest, the reordering the shortest.
With around 37,954 businesses in the painting and decorating trade (Bundesverband Farbe Gestaltung Bautenschutz), competition for interior work in the winter half exists in every catchment area. It is rarely fought out over the website, though, because most sites show the same facade order. That is exactly where the advantage lies for a business that reorders in October: it answers the question being asked right now, while the others answer the question from July.
- End of September: take stock with a journeyman, list the interior services and the recurring customer questions.
- First week of October: write the texts for four to six service pages, fix the time per room and the sequence.
- Second week of October: build the pages in, reorder the homepage, add the notice line about appointments for January and February.
- Third week of October: extend the form fields, receive the confirmation email yourself, check delivery to an external mailbox.
- Ongoing until March: two before-and-after pairs from the same corner per completed interior job, approval obtained in writing.
- Mid-March: back into the outdoor order, facade pages to the top, notice line changed to spring appointments.
Two orders, six pages, four form fields. The indoor season needs no more than that on the website. Anyone who would like support with it will find it with us as a web agency for painters and decorators - and in a way that lets the business make the changeover itself the following year.
Sources for this article
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