Name the municipalities you serve in the first screen, not on a buried service area page
A visitor who cannot tell in three seconds whether you cover their address will go back to the search results and find someone who says it out loud.
The City of St. Louis is an independent city, legally separate from St. Louis County. Buyers here know that and sort themselves by it. A header that says "serving greater St. Louis" tells a Webster Groves homeowner nothing and tells a Belleville homeowner even less.
Put the actual coverage where it cannot be missed. Named municipalities, the counties you work in, and a plain statement about whether you cross the river into the Metro East. If you do not sell in Illinois, say that too. Turning someone away in the first screen is cheaper than turning them away on the phone.
Group the names the way locals do, city separate from county, with St. Charles County called out on its own. The grouping itself signals that you live here.
Then keep it honest. A coverage list padded with places you rarely drive to produces inquiries your schedule cannot serve, and those cost you twice.
A brick two-family in Tower Grove photographs better than any product render
Hero imagery is a claim about what kind of houses you work on, and in this market that claim is checkable at a glance.
Stock photography of a bright frame house with a wide lawn tells a homeowner in Dogtown or the Central West End that you work somewhere else. A brick facade with real openings tells them the opposite in the time it takes to scroll.
Use your own installs. Shoot them consistently, whole opening in frame, exterior and interior, in ordinary light. Cropped detail shots of glass edges look like a catalog and prove nothing.
Range matters more than volume. A city two-family, a county ranch, a St. Charles County subdivision home, a storefront if you do commercial. Four honest examples across the housing stock beat forty of the same house.
Caption them with the municipality. A photo captioned Kirkwood is evidence. The same photo captioned "recent project" is decoration.
Six form fields, and two of them are about the wall around the opening
The inquiry form in this trade is a qualification tool, and the questions that matter most are about the opening rather than the window.
The minimum is name, phone, address, opening count, what is failing, and a photo upload. The address does dispatch work before anyone reads the message, because it tells you the municipality and therefore the drive and the paperwork.
Add one question this market specifically needs: is the exterior wall brick, frame or something else. Older brick openings are rarely a standard size, and knowing the wall type before the call changes what your estimator asks and how long the measure will take.
The photo upload earns its place here. One picture of the opening from inside tells you more about scope than three minutes of description, and homeowners are usually standing in front of it when they fill out the form.
Keep everything else off. Email marketing consent boxes, preferred contact windows and budget dropdowns depress completion and can be asked on the call.
Never ask the form to imply a diagnosis. Collecting a photo is fine. Publishing anything that reads as a promise about what is wrong with the wall is not.
Showroom hours and a real street address belong above the project gallery
A permanent local address is the one signal a traveling crew cannot manufacture, and it should not be sitting in the footer.
This trade attracts door knockers and out of town outfits, and homeowners know it. The site elements that separate you from them are unglamorous: a street address, a phone number that a person answers, showroom hours if you have a showroom, and how long you have been at that address.
Put those above the fold or immediately below it. Reviews and awards help, but they help less than an address in a suburb the visitor recognizes.
If you have a physical showroom, treat the page for it as a real page. Hours, parking, what is on display, and what a visit actually accomplishes. A homeowner spending five figures often wants to touch the product before signing.
Licensing statements should be specific and verifiable. State what you hold and where, note that requirements generally differ between Missouri and Illinois, and avoid any phrasing that reads as a guarantee of code compliance.
Every widget you add is paid for out of the visitor's data plan
The features that get requested most are the ones most likely to make the site slow enough that nobody sees them.
Chat bubbles, financing calculators, before and after sliders, video backgrounds and review carousels each carry weight. Stack three of them and a page that felt fine on the office fiber connection takes an uncomfortably long time on a phone in a driveway.
Budget the page like a load, not like a wish list. Compressed and correctly sized images, lazy loading below the fold, one web font family, and third party scripts limited to the ones you can name a business reason for.
Test on the hardware your buyers actually hold. A three year old midrange Android on a normal connection is the honest test. The designer's laptop is not.
Speed shows up in two places at once. Visitors leave slow pages, and page experience signals feed into how the site performs in search. You pay for the same problem twice.
Two paths through the site, because a Ladue homeowner and a University City landlord want different things
Retail replacement and small portfolio work are separate sales, and forcing both down one funnel loses one of them.
A homeowner is deciding about their own house and cares about appearance, comfort, disruption and price. A landlord or property manager with several buildings cares about scheduling, unit counts, turnaround and who they call when something goes wrong.
Give each a visible entry point in the navigation, then let the paths diverge. Different proof, different photos, different form. The portfolio path should ask for building count and unit count where the retail path asks what is failing.
Do not build a third path for commercial unless you actually do commercial work and can show it. An empty section reads as padding.
Keep the phone number identical across both. Splitting the intake is a routing decision inside your office, not something the visitor should have to solve.
On both paths, leave savings math, rebate eligibility and any promise about historic district approval off the site. Those are conversations to have with a specific address in hand, and they are worth confirming with the relevant authority rather than publishing.
Questions we actually get
- How many pages does a window and door dealer's site actually need?
- Fewer than most proposals suggest. A strong home page, one page per product line you genuinely sell, a proof page with real installs, a page for the retail buyer and one for portfolio work, plus municipality pages only where you have done work. Pages built to fill a sitemap dilute the site and give visitors more places to get lost.
- Should we publish prices?
- Publishing a range is usually better than publishing nothing, because the visitor who leaves to find a number rarely comes back. A range with the variables named, opening size, frame material, wall construction, is honest and screens out people who were never going to buy. Avoid a fixed per window figure, since custom sizing in older brick openings makes that number wrong often enough to cost you trust.
- Is a before and after slider worth the load time?
- Sometimes, if it is one slider on one page with properly sized images rather than a gallery of them. The value comes from the specific transformation, not from the interaction. A static pair of photos side by side gets most of the effect at a fraction of the weight.
- What should the form ask that most window company forms do not?
- Wall construction and a photo of the opening. In a brick dominant market those two answers change the estimate, the appointment length and sometimes whether the job is a window job at all. Address matters too, because it identifies the municipality and therefore the drive and the paperwork.
- Do we need separate pages for the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County?
- Yes, if you serve both. They are separate governments and locals treat them as separate places, so a single page that blends them reads as an outsider and competes poorly for both. Give each real proof, and treat St. Charles County and the Metro East the same way if you sell there.
