Proof you have worked on a raised house beats any manufacturer badge
The visitor is checking whether you belong on their block before they read a single word about glass.
Put your own work in the first screen. A shotgun house in Mid-City, a Creole cottage in the Marigny, a raised house with the crew working off the side steps. A stock photograph of a house with a lawn and a two car garage tells a local homeowner immediately that the site was built somewhere else.
Say what you install and what you do not, in a line. Wood, clad, fiberglass, vinyl, entry doors, patio doors, custom sizes. Say which parishes your crews cover. Two sentences answer the questions that otherwise cost you a phone call to disqualify.
Manufacturer logos are worth very little on their own, because every competitor carries the same three. Photographs of your crew on a local street, with the street visible, are the part that cannot be copied.
If you have worked in a historic district, show it and describe the constraint you worked within. Skip any claim about approvals you did not personally obtain.
Ask for the photo, the parish and the parking before you ask for a budget
The inquiry form in this trade is a dispatch tool, and the fields decide whether the next hour is wasted.
Ask for a photo first and make it work from a phone camera in one tap. One image of a rotted sill or a swollen door tells your estimator more than four dropdowns, and homeowners are happy to send it because it saves them explaining.
Then ask for the address or at least the parish, roughly how many openings, what is failing, whether the house is raised or on slab, and how the truck gets to the work. Access matters here in a way it does not in a subdivision. Narrow lots, no driveway, ladder placement on piers and street parking in the older neighborhoods all change the day.
Add one optional line for whether the property sits in a historic district, with an unsure option. Plenty of owners genuinely do not know, and the answer routes the inquiry.
Leave budget off the first form. Asking a stranger for a number before you have earned anything is the most reliable way to lose the inquiry, and the photo plus opening count tells you more anyway.
The phone number has to render before the hero image does
Speed on this site is not a score, it is whether a homeowner outdoors on cell data can call you before giving up.
Put the phone number in the page markup as a tap to call link near the top, not injected by a script that runs after everything else. On a weak connection in Gentilly or the Bywater, the header is sometimes all that arrives.
Install photography is the asset and the weight at the same time. Ship images sized for phones, use modern formats, lazy load anything below the fold, and stop the gallery from loading forty full resolution files nobody scrolls to.
Defer the extras. Chat bubbles, review carousels, financing calculators and multiple tag managers all cost more than they return on a site whose main job is a phone call.
Test on a real phone on cell data, not on office wifi and not in a desktop simulator. Walk outside, load the site, and count. Then hand it to someone over sixty and watch what they tap.
Say out loud what changes a price: rot, sills and an opening gone out of square
Every visitor is trying to work out whether you are expensive, and silence reads as expensive plus evasive.
Explain what drives cost in this market instead of publishing a fake number. Opening count. Material. Whether the trim, sill or framing is sound once the unit comes out. Whether the opening is still square, which in an older house on piers frequently it is not.
Describe how you handle discovery. If soft framing turns up behind a unit, say how that gets priced and communicated rather than letting the homeowner imagine the worst version.
Where movement or foundation questions come up, stay in your lane in writing. Note that a licensed engineer is the right call for anything structural, and that ground movement and drainage are ordinary considerations in this city rather than a crisis.
A published range, framed as a range with the variables named, loses you the shoppers who were never going to buy from you anyway. Consider that a feature of the page.
Tell them who shows up, what gets measured and what they sign
Most sites in this trade stop at the form and leave the visitor guessing about the part they actually fear.
Lay out the sequence on one page. Who comes to the house, roughly how long the visit takes, what gets measured, when the quote arrives, what is required to order, and what installation day looks like for the household.
Be specific about the disruptive part. Homeowners are not worried about the window, they are worried about an open wall, dust in a hundred year old house, and whether the job stops halfway. Saying how you close up at the end of a day removes a real objection.
Custom sizes mean lead times. Say that plainly on the site rather than letting it land as a surprise after the deposit.
Keep contract and warranty language on its own page and have your own counsel review it. Louisiana does not share the legal system used in the rest of the country, and terms copied from a national franchise site can be wrong here rather than simply generic.
The materials page has to admit which product is wrong for the block
A site that recommends against itself in one case is believed in every other case.
Write a real comparison. Wood, clad, fiberglass, aluminum, vinyl, with what each generally handles well in a humid climate, how each behaves with movement, and what maintenance the owner is signing up for.
Then say the uncomfortable part. On a visible exterior in a protected district, what is acceptable is generally shaped by historic district review, and some products that work fine in Kenner may not be the right answer in the Garden District. Any specific requirement is worth confirming with the relevant commission or the city.
Steering an Uptown homeowner toward the product that will actually be approved costs you one cheap sale and earns a referral network. It also stops the estimator from spending a Saturday quoting something that cannot be installed.
Link each material to the projects where you used it. A comparison table with no photographs behind it reads like it came out of a content package, because it usually did.
Questions we actually get
- How many fields should the quote form have?
- Few enough to finish standing outside. A photo upload, contact details, address or parish, opening count, what is failing, raised or slab, and access notes covers what dispatch needs. Everything else can happen on the phone. If a field does not change what you do next, cut it.
- Do we need a separate page for each neighborhood we serve?
- Only where you can back it with your own jobs and photographs. A page for Metairie, Uptown or Slidell earns its place when it shows work done there. A set of near identical pages with the name swapped tends to hurt the site and it does not persuade anyone who reads two of them.
- Should we publish prices?
- Publishing the variables usually beats publishing either a fixed number or nothing at all. Name what moves the price, including material, opening count and what turns up once a unit is removed, and give a range if you are comfortable defending it. Silence pushes price shoppers to call, which costs your team time.
- Is a before and after slider worth having?
- It is persuasive and it is heavy. One or two on a project page, with properly sized images, is fine. A gallery of them on the home page is one of the more common reasons these sites feel slow on a phone in a driveway.
- Can we say we handle historic district approvals?
- You can say what you do, such as preparing documentation or attending meetings, if that is genuinely your practice. Avoid anything that reads as a promised outcome. Requirements vary by district and are worth confirming with the relevant commission or the city, and a promise in writing is the kind of thing that surfaces later at the worst moment.
