Fixam

Profiles, ratings and reviews are wide open to browse. That openness is what pulls customers in, builds trust, and feeds local SEO — gating it would have killed all three. The single controlled moment is the contact itself: a customer tapping through to WhatsApp *is* a lead, and every one of those taps is silently logged from day one even though contact is free. It means Stage Two monetisation is a switch rather than a rebuild — the meter turns on at a gate that already exists, with months of real lead volume behind it.

The directory launched with 82 manual trades across 15 groups and later opened up to professionals — lawyers, accountants, architects, developers — reaching 99 leaves across 17 groups. People hire an accountant through the same motion as a plumber: find someone nearby, check who has used them, call. Adding them also stops Fixam being a one-visit site. The expansion renamed 'Structural Engineer' to 'Civil & Structural Engineer' but deliberately left its slug untouched, because renaming it would have orphaned every existing profile and every indexed URL pointing at it.

Once the directory held real data, the admin list rendered 50 profiles with up to six work photos each — 228 images on a single page, every one optimised on demand. It loaded as a wall of grey boxes and looked broken. Work photos now appear only while a decision is actually outstanding: they're essential for judging a submission and pure weight afterwards, so the browsing tabs get an avatar and a link instead. That took the approved tab from 228 images to 22, and pagination went in at the same time.

The site read like a document rather than a marketplace, and one line explained most of it: the scaffold shipped `--font-sans: var(--font-sans)` in globals.css. Self-referential, so it resolved to nothing and every page fell back to the browser's default serif. Replaced with Archivo across weights 400–900 — a grotesque drawn for signage, which is the physical object this brand comes from: the hand-painted signboards outside every workshop in Lagos. One family rather than a display/body pair, because two similar-but-not-identical sans-serifs read as an accident.

'List your services free' pointed at the signup page, which bounced anyone already signed in straight back — so for logged-in users the button appeared to do nothing. The real gap was larger: there was no path at all for an existing customer to become an artisan without creating a second account under a second email. Absurd for somebody who signed up to hire a plumber and happens to be an electrician. A single `/become-an-artisan` entry point now sits behind all 13 calls to action and handles four states — signed out, already an artisan, signed in but unverified, and signed-in customer.