Before & after
We don't redesign websites. We rebuild what they do.
A brochure site describes the business accurately and then sits there waiting. We turn it into the thing the rest of the marketing runs on: where search lands, where trust is built, and where buying stops being a phone call somebody has to work themselves up to.
Here is one, rebuilt section by section, with the thinking behind every decision.
Case 01 · Home improvement
Harlea Home Solutions LLC
A veteran-owned remodeling and home repair company in Fircrest, Washington, serving a ten-mile radius around Tacoma. Kitchens, bathrooms, windows, interiors and repairs. Eleven years in business, a five-star Google rating, and a website that was quietly working against all of it.
The old site was assembled on a page builder, and it had the failure mode they all share: every section was a paragraph with a button underneath. Eleven years of expertise flattened into text blocks. Nothing on the page did any work.
We rebuilt it from the ground up: new structure, new interaction model, original illustration, a proper design system and hand-written front-end code. The result is a site that asks questions, shows the craft, qualifies the lead and answers the objection before anyone has to pick up the phone.
- Strategy & structureThe page re-sequenced around the five decisions a homeowner actually makes, instead of the order a page builder puts things in.
- Interaction designFive working tools built from scratch: the room selector, the plan-to-built reveal, the four-step estimate, the service-area checker and the searchable FAQ.
- Original illustrationArchitectural plan drawings produced in-house for every service, plus the cut-away house in the hero. Nothing stock.
- Interface copywritingEvery question, label, step and call to action on the page written new. The client's service descriptions were kept and re-set where they were already doing their job.
- Design systemType scale, color, spacing and components defined once and applied throughout, so the next page costs a fraction of this one.
- Front-end engineeringHand-built, no page builder, no plugin stack. Two scripts instead of sixty.
- Search foundationsSemantic structure, named service areas on the page, and question-and-answer content shaped for how people and AI assistants actually ask.
The first screen stops asking, and starts asking something answerable.
A homeowner arrives knowing one thing: which room is bothering them. The old hero ignored that and went straight for their phone number.
What was there
A dim photograph of a roof edge that could be any trade at all. A logo rendered small and soft. Seven nav links including a dropdown. And a form demanding name, email and phone before the visitor had learned a single thing.
The company's single strongest differentiator, veteran-owned, appeared nowhere above the fold.
What we did
Replaced the stock photo with a cut-away of a house whose rooms are buttons: which part of your home needs work? Pick a room and the panel switches to that service with its own estimate link.
Added a live status strip that reads the actual business hours (Closed · opens today at 8:00 AM · text anytime), plus a trust bar carrying the warranty, the guarantee and the veteran-owned mark.
Why it pays
A form is a toll gate. A question is an invitation, and this one is easy. Everybody knows which room they hate.
The self-selection is also free intelligence: before anyone types a character, the site knows whether it's talking to a kitchen job or a window job, and can carry that into the estimate request.
Showing the craft, not just the result.
A remodeler's product isn't a photograph of a finished kitchen. It's the ability to get you from a drawing to that kitchen without the project going sideways. So we drew that.
What was there
Five photo cards and five View More links under a centered wall of text. The photographs are real jobs, which counts for something, but they are dark and flatly lit, and the bathroom shot is close to unreadable.
Nothing on the page explained how any of it gets done.
What we did
Tabbed the five services so they share one panel instead of five cards competing for attention. Inside it, a blueprint of the kitchen sits behind a drag handle: pull it across and the drawing becomes the finished room. Plan on one side, Built on the other.
Numbered callouts on the drawing key to the four things they actually sell on this job: cabinetry, lighting, countertops, layout.
Why it pays
It dramatizes the one thing a nervous homeowner is buying: that the finished thing will match what was promised.
It also makes one good photograph do the work of ten mediocre ones, which matters enormously for a contractor who is a builder, not a photographer.
The estimate stops being a wall and becomes a staircase.
Every contractor's site has a free-estimate form. Almost all of them open with the three fields a stranger is least willing to hand over.
What was there
A black band, a hundred and twenty words of prose, and a button that scrolled you back up to the same four-field form in the hero. The owner's photograph is here, and it's the best human moment on the old site, buried at the bottom.
What we did
Put the form itself in the section and broke it into four steps, opening with a question that costs nothing to answer: what do you need help with? Five buttons. No typing.
Beside it, the phone number and the live hours, because a good share of these customers would simply rather text.
Why it pays
Asking for a phone number first is asking for commitment before value. Asking which room needs work is a question people answer reflexively, and each answered step makes finishing more likely.
The lead that lands is also qualified: service, scope and timing arrive with it instead of a blank message box.
Answering the first question a local customer actually has.
Not "are you any good?" That comes second. First is "do you even come out to me?"
What was there
A paragraph naming six towns, and then, instead of doing anything with them, one stock photograph of Mount Rainier captioned Pierce County, WA, stranded on the left of a row that is otherwise empty, beside a button to go and find out elsewhere.
What we did
Turned the statement into a question (do we serve your town?) and put a box under it where you type your town and get an answer on the spot.
Replaced the scenery with a schematic of the ten-mile radius, labeled with the six towns by name. It is explicitly marked as not to scale, because pretending otherwise would be a lie.
Why it pays
The old page made people click to find out whether they were even eligible to be customers. Most won't.
And naming the towns on the page is not decoration. "Remodeling Puyallup" is what people type into Google. The map earns its place twice.
Proof, given a frame instead of a footnote.
The old page buried its single strongest asset, a five-star record from real customers, in the middle of a paragraph about how much customers like them.
What was there
A centered paragraph describing, in the company's own voice, how happy its customers are, followed by the thing that actually proves it: a Google 5.0 badge and three real reviews with names, dates and specifics.
What we did
Set the paragraph left so it can be read, and gave the Google rating a card of its own so it reads as evidence rather than a widget dropped mid-page.
Consolidated the section from 1,050 pixels of scrolling to 515.
Why it pays
Nobody believes a company describing its own popularity. They believe the score and they believe the names. Setting the rating as evidence, with its own card and its own weight, makes the page stop talking and start proving.
Halving the height matters too: proof that takes a thousand pixels to deliver mostly doesn't get delivered.
Next on this build
Launch is version one with real traffic behind it, not the finish line. Top of the list here: the named, dated reviews go back above the rating and get pulled live from Google, so they stay current without anyone opening a file. A person from University Place describing what happened to their kitchen outperforms a star average. We want the average and the names, kept fresh.
That is the whole principle, applied to our own work. The site going live is where the job starts.
A FAQ you can actually search.
FAQs grow. Once there are more than about eight, an accordion stops being a help and starts being a filing cabinet.
What was there
Ninety words explaining that the company understands remodeling can feel daunting, before a single question got answered. Next to it, a collage of four small photographs with no relationship to the questions.
What we did
Cut the preamble, added a search box, and let the questions start immediately with the one everybody has (do you offer a free, no-obligation estimate?) already open.
Why it pays
People arrive at a FAQ with a specific worry. Search gets them to it in one move instead of six.
There's a second payoff that compounds: clearly structured question-and-answer content is exactly what search engines and AI assistants lift when somebody asks "does anyone in Tacoma do kitchen remodels?"
Why these six
None of this is decoration. Each change serves a step on the pathway.
A website is where most of the seven steps either happen or fail. That's the whole reason we start here rather than with a campaign.
Get found
Towns named on the page, questions structured the way people ask them, and a site light enough to load before they leave.
Build trust
Warranty, guarantee and veteran-owned above the fold. The craft shown as plan-to-built, not just a gallery.
Stay relevant
A site structured in blocks gives the email and the postcard something to point at other than the homepage.
Be there when ready
Live hours, call-or-text, and an answer to "do you come out to me?" without a click.
Make buying easy
A four-step estimate that opens with a question anyone will answer, and a searchable FAQ for the ones who stall.
Maintain trust
Named reviews and real job photography, kept current. The part that is never finished.
Grow
A satisfied customer who can find you again, and send someone to a page that answers for you.
The point
The site isn't the marketing. It's the thing all the marketing has to land on.
Because the sale isn't where marketing ends. It's where the next one begins.