Play equipment inspector websites
If you inspect play equipment - bouncy castles and big inflatables to BS EN 14960, playgrounds to BS EN 1176, PIPA testing, RPII inspections, whatever you call the work - your website has one specific job: convincing hire companies, councils, schools and venues that you're the competent, organised inspector your paperwork says you are. I build websites for play equipment inspectors and I host a few of them now, and every one of them can plug into play-test, the open source inspection logging tool I developed.
I know the hire industry from the inside
From 2009 to 2019 I was the lead developer at Bouncy Castle Network, a booking platform that grew to over a thousand hire companies, so I know what hirers need from their inspectors: tests booked around a season that doesn't stop, reports that arrive in days rather than weeks, and tags that hold up when a venue or a council asks to see them.
What an inspector's site needs to do
Mostly it needs to be findable and believable. Findable means service pages for the towns you cover, because hire companies search for "bouncy castle inspection Birmingham" - or Atherstone, or Nuneaton - when their annual is due, and a page that exists for that town beats a clever homepage every time. Believable means the standards named correctly, your experience and registrations stated plainly, photos of you actually doing the work, and none of the generic "quality solutions provider" copy that makes a one-person inspection business look like a call centre.
The inspection database bit
This is the part I can offer that most web developers can't: play-test is my own open source tool for logging inflatable inspections to BS EN 14960:2019 - equipment records, guided assessment forms, safety calculations that show their working, and PDF reports with QR codes on. It's free to use, and that's deliberate - safety tooling shouldn't be paywalled - and your inspection PDFs come out with your company branding on them. Because every unit gets a QR code, a hirer can scan the tag on a castle and see that unit's test history on the spot, which is what venues ask for at the gate. And if you want your own branded version on your own domain, for your whole company, that's the bit I charge hosting for.
A few examples
Play Safe Play Inspection is Gary's site. He inspects playgrounds and indoor play centres around Chorley to BS EN 1176 and BS EN 1177 as well as inflatables, and needed something credible enough for councils, schools and holiday parks - the Chobble Template blocks layout gave him that without custom code.
Midland Play Inspections is the biggest of the inspector sites I host: twenty-seven town pages across the Midlands, guides for hirers about tags and paperwork, and a case studies section, all built to rank for the towns Luke covers.
The play-test example page has the full story of the database itself.
Getting the words out of your head
If writing website copy sounds like a chore, it doesn't have to be you doing it. Gary's site content came from WhatsApp voice notes he sent me between jobs, which I transcribed and shaped into service pages for him to check over - he never had to sit down and type a word of it.
Pricing
Standard rates, no industry markup: £200 an hour for the build, hosting from £10 a month, or £40 a month with updates, monitoring and my help with marketing thrown in. Town pages are cheap to add once the structure is in, which is rather the point of building the structure properly in the first place.
Questions
Is it just bouncy castles?
No - Gary's main work is playground inspections to BS EN 1176 and BS EN 1177, and plenty of BS EN 14960 inspectors spend most of their time on big inflatables rather than castles. If you inspect anything with a British Standard number attached, the shape of the site is the same: what you inspect, where you cover, why you're the one to trust with it.
My hirers use different inspection software - does that matter?
Not for the website. play-test exports everything as PDF, JSON and CSV, so nothing lives in a format you can't take with you, and you can keep using whatever you currently get on with. The website's job is being findable and believable - the tooling around it is your choice.
If you inspect play equipment and your website isn't pulling its weight, fill in the form below and tell me what you cover.