Say the parishes out loud, because greater New Orleans answers nothing
The first screen exists to settle service area, house type and price posture before the visitor scrolls.
A homeowner in Slidell and a homeowner in Algiers both read greater New Orleans as maybe. Naming Orleans, Jefferson and St. Tammany, or naming the specific neighborhoods you work in, converts the maybe into a yes or a no, and both are useful.
Use the word parish. It costs nothing and it is the fastest signal available that whoever built this site has been here. A visitor who sees county in your copy has learned something about you that no testimonial will undo.
Add the shape of the work in the same breath. Full kitchens and full baths, or additions, or whatever you actually do. A visitor who cannot tell your scope in five seconds assumes you do everything, which reads as doing nothing well.
A starting price posture belongs here too. Not a quote, a floor. Saying that most of your kitchens start above a certain point saves you the calls you do not want and costs you almost nothing.
Photograph the piers and the leveling, because that is the part buyers doubt
Finished-kitchen photography proves taste, and this market needs you to prove competence under the floor.
Every competitor has a photograph of a white island with a bowl of lemons on it. None of them prove you can work on a raised house where the floor has moved and the joist run does not cooperate.
Show the crawl space. Show the shimming and the leveling. Show the new drain line run before the subfloor went back down, and the seam where new work meets an original floor that will never be perfectly flat.
Write two sentences under each photograph explaining what the problem was and what you did. The photographs sell to the spouse. The captions sell to the person who has been reading about subsidence for a month and is quietly terrified.
Ask for written permission before publishing anybody's home, and keep the address off the page. Naming the neighborhood is plenty.
Your intake form is the estimator's prep sheet, so build it that way
Design the form around the four facts that decide whether the visit is worth a truck and what the estimator brings.
Parish or neighborhood. Roughly when the house was built. Whether it sits on piers or on a slab, with an option for not sure. Whether the plumbing has to move, again with not sure as a real answer.
Those four answers change the scope more than square footage does, and every one of them is a question a homeowner can answer without a tape measure. Not sure is genuinely useful information, because it tells the estimator to arrive with a flashlight and no assumptions.
Let people attach photographs. One picture of the room and one of what is under the house saves a phone call and often saves a wasted trip across the lake.
Then stop. Every extra field costs completions, and anything you can find out on the call does not belong on the form. Budget in particular is better asked by a person than by a dropdown.
Cut the hero video, it costs you the first three seconds and buys nothing
On this site, speed is decided by the gallery and the video header, and one of those is doing no work.
An autoplaying video of a finished kitchen is the single most expensive element on most remodeling sites, and it delays the moment a visitor can read the one line that would have kept her there.
A single well compressed photograph loads faster and communicates the same thing. Spend the saved weight on the gallery, which is the part of the site that actually persuades.
Serve gallery images at the size they display, in a modern format, and load them as the visitor scrolls rather than all at once. Eighty full resolution photographs on one page is a decision to lose the visitor who is standing in her driveway on a weak signal.
Third party scripts deserve the same scrutiny. A chat widget, a review carousel and three tracking tags will slow a site more than the photography does, and at least the photography is selling something.
Let a cautious homeowner verify your license without leaving the page
Older houses and larger budgets produce careful buyers who will check, so make checking easy.
Put your license number, your insurance posture and your legal business name in readable type, not in a footer graphic. The homeowner who wants to verify will verify, and the ones who cannot find it assume the worst.
Include a physical address if you have one. Nothing else on a website does as much for local trust, and it also supports how local search results treat you.
Skip the wall of badges. A row of logos nobody can verify reads as decoration, and the sophisticated buyer you want for a full kitchen has seen it on every site she visited today.
Say who shows up. The name of the person who will run her job, and who she calls when something goes sideways, does more than any award. Keep the claims plain and let people confirm the details themselves.
Architects, designers and agents send work here, so give them a page to forward
A meaningful share of good jobs arrives through a professional, and your site is what they hand over.
An architect in the Garden District or a kitchen designer working Uptown will not send a client to a site that does not make her look good. She needs one page she can forward with confidence.
Build it for her. How you work with outside designers, what you need in a drawing set, how you handle allowances and change orders, and honest photographs of collaborative jobs. Plain, specific, unsentimental.
Add a second door for real estate agents, who meet buyers standing in a kitchen that needs work and need to hand somebody a name that day. A short page and a direct phone line is enough.
Referral traffic converts better than anything you buy, and it is the cheapest section of the site to build. Most remodelers never build it because nobody searching Google asked for it.
Questions we actually get
- How many pages does a remodeling site actually need?
- Fewer than most agencies sell and more than a one page site. A home page that settles service area and scope, a page per major service, a real project gallery with write-ups, a page on how you work, a referral partner page and a contact page cover it. Adding parish or neighborhood pages makes sense when you have something genuinely different to say about each.
- Should we publish prices on the site?
- Publish a starting range rather than a price. Saying that most kitchens start above a given figure filters out the shoppers who were never going to buy and reassures the ones who were, without committing you to a number before you have seen the house. Firm quotes belong after somebody has been under the floor.
- Is a chat widget worth adding?
- Only if a person answers it during business hours. An unanswered chat bubble is worse than no chat bubble, and both cost page speed. For a considered purchase like a kitchen, a tappable phone number and a form that captures the right four facts generally outperform chat.
- Do we need permission to show a client's kitchen?
- Get it in writing as a habit, and keep addresses off the site. Naming the neighborhood is enough for credibility and avoids the awkward conversation later. If the work is on a rental or an investment property, the permission needs to come from whoever actually owns it.
- What is the single biggest mistake on remodeling websites here?
- Being unclear about geography. Visitors arrive asking whether you work where they live, and vague phrasing sends them back to search results to find somebody who answered plainly. Name the parishes and the neighborhoods, say what you do not cover, and let the site do the sorting for you.
