A shareholder, a managing agent and a landlord all land on the same homepage
Three buyers with different questions arrive at one page, and a single generic path loses at least two of them.
The shareholder wants to know whether you have done work in a building like theirs and how long their apartment is open to the weather. The agent wants insurance, staging and schedule. The landlord wants a price and a date and very little else.
Give them three visible routes in the first screen. Apartment and homeowner. Building and managing agent. Rental and small property owner. Plain words, no clever labels, placed where a thumb reaches on a phone.
Routing is not a cosmetic choice. It decides which page they read next, which form they fill, and which of your people picks up the call. Sending all three down one path produces an inbox where every inquiry needs a phone call to make sense of it.
Say your coverage early. Boroughs and neighborhoods you actually serve, stated before the manufacturer logos. A visitor in Staten Island who has to hunt for whether you cross the bridge will simply go back to the search results.
Prove you have worked a six-story walk-up before you name the manufacturer
Proof of access experience beats product credentials for a buyer whose real fear is logistics.
Homeowners here are not worried about the glass. They are worried about how a full frame unit gets to the fourth floor of a walk-up, whether the stairwell turn will take it, what happens to the hallway, and how many days the sidewalk is occupied.
Photograph the parts nobody photographs. A hoist off a fire escape landing, units staged in a lobby with floor protection down, a narrow stairwell mid carry, a brownstone parlor window opening with the weight pocket exposed. Ordinary photos of real jobs outperform retouched before and after sliders.
Caption them with the building type and the borough, not with marketing language. A Bay Ridge two family, a prewar walk-up in Washington Heights, an elevator building in Long Island City. Specificity is the proof.
Product pages still matter, but they belong after the access argument. A homeowner who believes you can do the job will read about the window. A homeowner who does not believe it never gets that far.
The inquiry form has to capture the floor, the freight elevator and who signs off
Four extra fields decide whether an inquiry can be scheduled at all, and they cost less than the calls they save.
Ask for the address, the floor, whether the building has an elevator, and roughly how many openings. Ask whether a co-op board or condo board has to approve the work. Ask what is failing, in the owner's own words.
Every one of those answers changes the job. Fourth floor with no elevator changes the crew and the day. Board approval changes the timeline and the paperwork. Twenty openings changes who calls back.
Add an optional photo upload. A single picture of the window, taken from inside, answers questions that three emails would not, and homeowners are already holding the phone in the room.
Do not ask for a budget range, and do not gate the form behind a multi step wizard. Six or seven fields, one screen, a phone number field that accepts any format, and a confirmation that says clearly what happens next and when.
Certificates of insurance and alteration-agreement experience should not be buried in a PDF
For building work, the documentation conversation is the sales conversation, and the site should start it.
A managing agent evaluating three contractors is screening on process before price. Say plainly that you carry insurance, that you have produced certificates naming the parties a building requires, and that you have worked under alteration agreements. Requirements vary by building and are worth confirming with the managing agent.
Publish your license information where it can be checked, and nothing you cannot document. Vague claims about being fully licensed and approved read as filler to someone who reviews contractor paperwork every week.
Describe how you work in an occupied building. Hours, protection of common areas, debris removal, and how you handle a freight elevator window that is shorter than the work. Concrete operational detail is more persuasive than any promise of quality.
Never claim board approval, landmark approval or any code outcome. Describe what you generally do and where the confirmation belongs, which is with the building department, the managing agent, your insurer or the owner's own counsel.
Cut the chat widget and the 3D configurator before you cut the install photos
Speed is a New York problem in a way it is not elsewhere, because half your visitors are underground or on a crowded network.
Traffic to this trade arrives on phones, often on a platform at Jackson Heights or in a lobby with one bar. A page that needs four seconds and six third party scripts is a page most of those visitors never see.
The heaviest things on a typical window dealer site are rarely the photographs. They are the chat widget, the review carousel, the financing calculator, the visualizer and three analytics tags nobody has audited in two years. Remove what does not earn its weight and measure again.
Keep the photos, but serve them properly: compressed, correctly sized for the device, and loaded lazily below the first screen. Install photography is your strongest asset and it can be fast.
Test on an older Android phone on a throttled connection, not on the designer's monitor. The gap between those two experiences is where inquiries disappear.
Leave landmark approvals, Con Edison rebate math and building names off the site
The claims most tempting to publish are the ones most likely to cost you a job or a client relationship.
Do not publish savings calculations tied to utility bills. Energy math depends on the building, the heating system and the rate, and a prewar building on steam heat behaves nothing like a national model.
Do not name buildings, boards or managing agents without written permission. A board that discovers itself in your portfolio is a reference you have lost, and possibly a job.
Do not promise any approval. Landmark review, building department outcomes and board decisions are not yours to guarantee, and saying so plainly makes the rest of the site more credible, not less.
Publish instead what you can stand behind: real photographs, real building types, real timelines including the waiting, and clear statements of what varies by building and is worth confirming with the managing agent or the local building department.
Questions we actually get
- How many fields should the quote form have for this trade?
- Six or seven, on one screen. Address, floor, elevator or walk-up, number of openings, whether a board has to approve, what is failing, and contact details. An optional photo upload is worth including. Longer forms lose homeowners, and shorter ones produce inquiries nobody can schedule without a phone call.
- Should we build separate pages for co-op and condo work?
- Yes. The buyer, the vocabulary and the decision process are different enough that one page cannot serve both audiences well. Building focused pages should cover insurance documentation, occupied unit staging and freight scheduling, while homeowner pages cover what happens inside the apartment.
- Is a before and after slider worth having?
- Usually not as the centerpiece. Sliders are heavy, they are frequently the slowest element on the page, and they answer a question New York buyers are not asking. Plain photographs of access, staging and stairwell work do more persuading for a fraction of the weight.
- How fast does the site need to be?
- Fast enough that it renders usefully on an older phone on a weak connection, which is the realistic condition for a large share of your traffic. Test in that condition rather than on office wifi, and audit third party scripts first, since they are almost always the problem before the photographs are.
- Can we show projects in specific buildings?
- Only with written permission from the board or managing agent, and generally it is safer to describe the building type, borough and scope without naming it. Anonymous detail persuades just as well, and it avoids putting a client relationship at risk over a portfolio page.
