Most of these visits happen at night, on a phone, in the kitchen being replaced
The typical visitor is standing in the room they have grown to hate, holding a phone, comparing you against two other names a neighbor passed along.
Design for that person. Reading happens in short bursts with the television on and somebody in the next room. Long introductions and full width video get scrolled straight past.
What they want in the first screen: the kind of work you do, where you do it, and how to start. A line naming the City of St. Louis separately from the county municipalities you cover does more real work than any headline about craftsmanship.
Tappable phone number at the top. A form usable with one thumb. Photographs that appear before patience runs out.
The desktop visit usually comes later, often from the other decision maker in the house. Build the phone view first and let the desktop layout be the generous version, not the reverse.
Before and after pairs sell here, because the buyer wants the old house to survive
In a market full of older brick houses, the proof homeowners want is that new work can sit inside an old house without looking bolted on.
Show the before. The dark galley, the pink tile, the soffit nobody wanted. Then the identical angle, finished.
Shoot the after from exactly where the before was taken. Two photographs from two different corners of a room prove nothing, and buyers notice.
Include what other companies crop out: the original window that stayed in the new bathroom, the doorway that could not move, the masonry wall that decided the whole layout.
Caption like a builder rather than a brochure. What the house was, what the constraint was, what you did about it. Two plain sentences per project outperform a page of adjectives.
Let people attach three phone photos and you will quote better than anyone else on their list
The inquiry form for this trade should gather what an estimator needs in order to prepare, not just a name and a number.
Ask for the address, or at minimum the municipality. Ask which room. Ask roughly when they want the work done. Ask whether they own the house.
Then ask for pictures. A simple upload field, three images, no account required. Photographs of the current bathroom tell an estimator more than any dropdown you could design.
Keep the visible form short. Anything you can ask on the confirmation screen instead of the form itself, ask there, because people answer more freely once they have already committed.
Budget is the awkward field. Asking for a range up front costs you inquiries; never asking costs you visits. A middle path is a scope question, since somebody who selects gutting the bathroom and moving the plumbing has told you what you needed to know.
A slow gallery does not bounce, it just never gets forwarded to the spouse
Speed on a remodeling site is mostly a photography problem, and the cost of getting it wrong is a second visit that never happens.
The portfolio is the most persuasive thing you own and by far the heaviest. Photographers deliver files sized for print. Loaded straight onto a page, forty of them will bring a phone to a halt.
Resize, compress, serve modern formats, and load anything below the fold only as somebody scrolls. Give the single hero image priority and make everything else wait its turn.
Audit the scripts as well. Chat bubbles, review widgets, tracking tags and font files accumulate quietly, and every one of them was added by somebody who assumed it was free.
Test on a mid range Android phone over a cell connection rather than on office wifi. The gap between those two experiences is where inquiries quietly disappear.
A homeowner in Webster Groves should find a kitchen like theirs in two taps
Organize the portfolio the way people recognize houses here, by place and house type, rather than by countertop material.
Somebody in University City wants to see a kitchen inside a house shaped like theirs. Somebody in Chesterfield wants to see newer construction. Same company, two different pieces of proof.
Filters that work: municipality or neighborhood, room, house era, and scope. Filters that do not: finish styles nobody can name, and price bands people feel awkward clicking.
Give every filtered view its own address on the site so those pages can be linked from your municipality pages and found on their own.
Get written permission before publishing anybody's house, and leave street addresses off entirely. Homeowners are generous with photographs and particular about privacy, and the two are easy to keep separate.
Answer the Illinois question on the site instead of on the phone
Service area doubt is one of the most common reasons somebody leaves a remodeling website, and the answer costs nothing to publish.
Write the list out. Name the City of St. Louis separately from St. Louis County, name the municipalities you cover, and say clearly whether you cross the Mississippi into Madison County and St. Clair County.
Put the credential block next to it. How long you have worked here, your insurance posture, and where you are licensed to work. Keep it general and accurate, since requirements differ by state and by municipality, and point readers to their local building department rather than trying to explain the rules on their behalf.
Name the people. Who runs the measure, who leads the project, who designs. A remodeling client is agreeing to let strangers into the house for weeks, and a page of stock photography does not help them decide.
A map graphic alone is not enough on a phone. Write the place names in text, because text is what gets read at arm's length and what gets indexed.
Questions we actually get
- Do I need a whole new site or can we fix the one we have?
- Often it can be fixed. If the platform is current and the structure is sane, the highest value work is usually image handling, the inquiry form, the service area content and the portfolio organization. A rebuild makes sense when the site cannot be edited without a developer or when it was never built for phones.
- How many project photos should I publish?
- Enough to cover the house types and municipalities you serve, presented in before and after pairs rather than as a wall of finished shots. Depth matters more than count: eight projects documented properly, with the constraints described, persuade better than sixty images with no context.
- Should I put prices on the website?
- You do not need fixed numbers, and in this trade they would be misleading anyway. A general statement of where projects of a given type tend to start, with an honest note that older houses can hold surprises behind the walls, tends to reduce the calls you did not want without scaring off serious buyers.
- Do I need a separate page for every area I serve?
- For the municipalities where you actually work and have projects to show, yes. For everywhere else, no. Thin location pages produced in bulk tend to get dismissed as a group, which can drag down the honest ones sitting alongside them.
- Does the platform matter, WordPress or something else?
- Less than the content and the image handling do. What matters is that you or your team can update the portfolio without hiring somebody, that the site loads quickly on a phone, and that forms deliver reliably to a place a human checks. A fast, editable site on an unfashionable platform beats a slow one on a fashionable platform.
