My Grooming Van Finally Has a Web Page I Can Text to People

The dryer was still ticking as it cooled when I sat sideways in the driver’s seat, van door open onto a customer’s driveway, and picked up the phone between a spaniel and a cockapoo. Four unread messages. Two were regulars moving their dates. The other two came from numbers I didn’t have saved, and I knew roughly what they would ask before I opened them.

New people want to know if I come out as far as their village. Once that’s settled they ask what a full groom involves compared with a bath and brush, and somewhere after that, which days I work.

I’d been answering with a reply saved as a text shortcut, and over a year it had grown to a paragraph and a half, ending with a line about how I reply between appointments because I can’t hold clippers and a phone at once. Pasting a wall of text at someone who sent one line felt off. Typing it fresh with a wet thumb was worse.

Everything else in the business already lives on that phone. Bookings go in its calendar, and customers are saved in contacts under the dog’s name with the owner’s after it. Even the card reader in the van pairs with it. A website was the one thing I’d never got round to, partly because the builders I’d heard of seemed to want an account before anything else.

So the plan was small: one page, and my reply to a new number could shrink to a friendly line and a link.

Making it at the kitchen table

I did it on the laptop one evening while the last load of towels went round. I went to rewind.ai and used its ai website builder free page, which is a single form under two reassuring little tags, one promising no sign-up and one saying the output is HTML and CSS. I knew HTML only as the stuff web pages are made of, and the word code made me a bit nervous. I filled it in anyway.

1. Website Type: Business. Nothing on the list says grooming, and Business was the nearest thing to a van full of shampoo.
2. Color Scheme: Soft Pastel, because the van is pale pink with a paw print on the back doors.
3. Describe Your Website: what I say on doorsteps, lifted almost straight from my saved reply: “Muddy Paws Mobile Grooming: a one-van dog grooming service that comes to your driveway. Bath and brush, full groom, nail trim, puppy’s first groom. We cover the north side of town and the nearby villages. Bookings by text message only, we reply between appointments. Monday to Saturday.”
4. Pages Needed: Home, Services, Contact. I left About empty, since nobody booking a nail trim needs my life story.
5. Extra Features: “a big tap-to-text button for booking on phones, responsive”. Everyone who finds me is on a phone, and I wanted them to book with a thumb instead of copying my number.
6. Generate.

What came back under the form was code, one long file of it. The three pages I’d ticked had become parts of a single page, with a menu along the top that jumps down to each. I didn’t try to read it. Download .html saved it as rewind-result.html, and I double-clicked the file.

It opened in the browser as a proper page. Muddy Paws across a pink header, “At Your Doorstep”, a line about grooming in the van right in your driveway on the North Side and the surrounding villages, my days in a white card. Then the button I’d asked for, “Text to Book Now”, big and mint green, with the services as cards underneath. I dragged the browser window as narrow as it would go and everything stacked into one column, the button stretching almost edge to edge, which is about right for someone holding a lead in the other hand.

The two I’d tried before that

Durable, a few evenings earlier, took me from Start for free straight to “Create your free account”: Google, Apple or email, no credit card required. Its home page promises to get a business online in thirty seconds, and if I’d had nowhere to put a page of my own I might well have signed up and let it handle the rest. I already had web space that came with my email, though, and didn’t want one more login for a page I’ll change twice a year.

Carrd I liked the look of. One-page sites are its whole pitch, which is exactly the size of what I wanted, and the Choose a Starting Point button opens its layouts without asking you to sign in. I scrolled through Profile and Landing for a while. Someone who enjoys arranging a page would have a nice evening in there; I’m happier describing the business in a few sentences than moving blocks around.

Putting it up, and what I send now

Before it went anywhere I opened the file in the plain text editor that came with the laptop, swapped the stand-in phone number for mine in both buttons, and typed my prices in after each service, careful not to lose any of the angle brackets.

Putting it online was the part I’d been dreading, and it took the least time. The company I pay for email on my own domain threw in some web space years ago, and its control panel has a file manager with an upload button. I renamed rewind-result.html to index.html, which is what a site’s front page is usually called, and uploaded it over the coming soon page that had sat there ever since.

Next morning, parked up before the first dog, I opened the address on my phone and tapped Text to Book Now. A new message to my own number opened with a line already written in it, asking to book a grooming session. I deleted it and drove off.

I wasn’t sure people would read a page when they could just text me another question. Some still ask, and I answer.

What a new number gets from me now is one line, from the shortcut where the long paragraph used to live: thanks for getting in touch, everything’s on here including the villages I cover, text me back with your dog’s name and a day that suits. Then the address.

The old paragraph is still saved on the phone. I’ve pasted it once since, for someone who wanted the whole lot in the text itself.