Prove you have built behind a raised house before you show a single rendering
The first screen has one job here, and it is not aspiration.
Much of the older city sits on piers rather than slab, with narrow lots, tight rear yards and no straightforward path for a machine. A homeowner in the Bywater or Uptown has already been told by somebody that it cannot be done on their lot.
Lead with evidence. A photograph of your equipment working a constrained site, a one line statement of the parishes you build in, and a clear path to a phone number will outperform a hero image of somebody else's Northshore backyard every time.
Say what kinds of lots you take on and, just as usefully, which ones you decline. Turning away the wrong inquiry on the homepage saves a truck roll and reads as confidence rather than limitation.
Keep the top of the page short. On a phone, the visitor sees roughly one screen before deciding to scroll or leave, and a full width video eats that screen without answering anything.
A page for the pool that has to come out before a new one goes in
Renovation and replacement visitors take a different path through the site and most builder sites give them nowhere to go.
The owner of a pool in Metairie or Gentilly that was built decades ago has a completely different problem than someone with an empty yard. They want to know whether it is worth saving, what a resurface generally involves, and what would change if they replaced it outright.
Give them their own route from the navigation. Separate pages for resurfacing, decking and coping, equipment replacement and full remodel, each with before and after photography from real jobs.
Photographs of failures are unexpectedly persuasive. Lifted decking, a cracked bond beam, tired plaster. Owners recognize their own pool and feel understood before they have read a word.
Do not diagnose from the page. Describe what usually causes what you are showing, then say that a specific pool needs eyes on it, and that anything structural belongs with a licensed engineer.
Photograph the carriageway, the crane mat and the fence you took down
Your gallery should be an argument about access, not a lookbook.
Every finished pool photograph looks roughly like every other finished pool photograph. What separates you is the middle of the job, which is also the part that answers the visitor's real question.
Show the machine coming through a side yard. Show the fence panel removed and put back. Show the shoring, the steel, the pour, the equipment set on a pad under a raised house.
Label them by site condition rather than by year or by client name. Narrow lot, corner lot, rear alley access, courtyard. A visitor scanning for a yard like theirs finds it in seconds.
Never publish a client address, a gate code, a house number in frame, or anything recorded that identifies a property. Ask permission before a job goes in the gallery and keep the permission on file.
The inquiry form has to learn the parish, the gate and the overhead line
Six well chosen fields will tell you more than a long form that nobody finishes.
Ask for the parish or the nearest cross street, not just a zip code. Ask what the access to the backyard looks like and roughly how wide. Ask whether there is an existing pool. Ask what is driving the timing.
Add an image upload. A homeowner will happily send three photos of a side yard, and those photos will save a wasted trip across the lake more often than any qualifying question you can write.
Keep the required fields short and let the rest be optional. Every mandatory field costs completions, and the phone conversation can fill gaps that a form never will.
Set expectations at the point of submission. Tell them who will call, roughly when, and what will happen on the first visit. Vagueness at that moment is where inquiries go quiet.
Speed is a design decision made in the photo folder, not in the code
The heaviest thing on a pool website is always the work you are proudest of.
Construction photography comes off the phone enormous. Uploaded straight into a gallery, a single page can carry many megabytes, and a visitor on a weak signal in a backyard will leave before the second image appears.
Fix it at the source. Resize before upload, serve modern formats, size images to the space they occupy, and lazy load everything below the fold. The gallery keeps its impact and loses most of its weight.
Video is the other common offender. An autoplaying background clip on the homepage is the most expensive decoration available, and it rarely earns its cost in inquiries.
Test on a real phone on cellular data, not on office wifi. The difference between the two is the difference between a site that feels fast and a site that only measures fast.
A build sequence page that includes dewatering, inspection and the wet week
Publishing the real sequence sets expectations before the deposit rather than after it.
A three step graphic reading design, build, swim insults an audience that already suspects the job is more complicated than that. Write the actual sequence, including the parts that involve waiting.
Cover site evaluation, drawings, permitting and any review that applies to a visible exterior, excavation and how water is managed, steel and shell, decking, equipment and final inspection. Say plainly that requirements vary and are worth confirming with the parish, the relevant commission or your own counsel.
Name the things that move a date. Weather, inspection scheduling, material lead time, access constraints on a tight lot. Owners forgive delays they were warned about and remember the ones they were not.
A page like that also does quiet sales work. It filters out the buyer who wants to swim in three weeks and reassures the one who is choosing between you and a cheaper quote with no process behind it.
Questions we actually get
- How many pages does a pool company site actually need?
- Fewer than most agencies propose and more than most builders have. A homepage that proves capability, one page per job type including the renovation work, a gallery organized by site condition, a build process page, a service area page naming parishes honestly, and a contact page that works on a phone. Depth on those beats thirty thin pages.
- Should I show prices on the site?
- Ranges and price drivers, generally yes. Fixed prices, generally no, because access, site conditions and finish selections move the number too much. Explaining what pushes a project up or down qualifies buyers before they call and reduces the number of conversations that end at the first figure.
- Do I need a separate mobile site?
- No, but the design needs to be built mobile first, since most visitors arrive on a phone and a meaningful share of them are outdoors in poor signal. Tap targets, a phone number that dials with one tap, forms that work with a thumb, and images sized for cellular data matter more than anything that only shows on a desktop screen.
- What about reviews and awards on the homepage?
- Worth including, placed near the proof rather than in a decorative band. Real review text with a first name and a neighborhood carries more weight than a star count. Do not invent, edit or reorder reviews, and do not display credentials or license claims you cannot document.
- Can you rebuild the site without losing the rankings we have?
- That is the plan on any rebuild. Existing URLs are inventoried, redirects are mapped one to one, page content is preserved where it is already performing, and the launch is monitored for crawl errors. Some short term movement is normal after a rebuild. Losing established pages entirely is not, and it is avoidable with the mapping done first.
