Yellow, black and one phone number

De Huiskoper buys houses. Directly, in any condition, in and around Ghent. No estate agent in between, no clearing out, no listing, no strangers walking through your living room. One visit, one offer, and if you say yes you sign the preliminary contract.

A business like that doesn’t need a website that is beautiful. It needs one that makes the phone ring. That was the entire brief, and the page has been sacrificed to it completely. The number appears fourteen times on the home page. That is not an oversight.

The call page carries a telephone keypad. 1, 2 ABC, 3 DEF, all the way to the hash key, with a green call button underneath that simply dials the number on a phone.

It isn’t necessary. A number with a link under it does exactly the same thing. But it says in one image what this site is for, and it is the only part of the page where you get to play for a moment.

The thing that stops people selling this way is rarely the price. It is embarrassment. They don’t call because they think the house has to be cleared, painted or repaired first.

So the page carries a row of buttons: move-in ready, dated, fixer-upper, derelict, full of stuff, empty for years. Press yours and you get a drawing of exactly that house with a stamp across it: WE’LL BUY IT. Under ‘dated’ it says, in so many words, brown tiles, an orange kitchen, grandma’s curtains. No estate agent’s site dares to show that.

Below it sits your to-do list for selling a house. Ten lines: clear up, repair, paint, book a photographer, place a listing, show ten sets of viewers around, negotiate, wait for the buyer’s bank, pay commission.

And then they are struck through one by one, in front of you, with a counter beside them running up to nine. What is left is a single line: call De Huiskoper. There is a small button underneath to watch it happen again. We pressed it too often while testing.

What does it cost you? That question is answered with a till receipt. Agent’s commission: € 0.00. Clearing: € 0.00. Repairs, painting, photographer, listing: all € 0.00. Viewings: 1 ×. Total payable to us: € 0.00, with a barcode underneath and ‘Thanks. Call us’ beside it.

It is the cheeriest accounting document we have ever drawn, and it answers at a glance a question that otherwise takes three paragraphs.

No smiling couple holding a key. No ‘our values’. No blog, no newsletter, no chat bubble that opens by itself after five seconds.

And one section we spent longest on: the reasons people need to sell quickly. An inheritance, a divorce, debt, a move into care. They are simply there, as words in a row, with a line above them: you don’t have to explain anything. No photographs, no sympathy, no little story. Anyone who recognises themselves needs nothing more than that sentence — and the promise below it that no board goes up in their garden.

Being wild on a website is easy. Knowing where to stop is the work.

Not every business needs a shop window. Sometimes a page has to do one thing and everything else has to give way to it. Tell us what that one thing is: get in touch.

And if you happen to have a house standing empty near Ghent: dehuiskoper.be. You know the number by now.