Web Hosting for General Contractors

What a project page needs beyond the photograph

The fix is not more photographs. It is fewer projects, described properly. Six projects with real detail beat forty pictures in a grid, and they take less time to keep current.

A project page that works reads a bit like a short job summary written for somebody outside the trade. Here is the shape that carries the coordination story without you having to claim anything about yourself.

1. What the client wanted, in their words

   Two or three sentences of the actual brief. "They had a 1920s house, three bedrooms, one bathroom upstairs, and a second child coming." This is where the reader recognises their own situation, and it is the part that gets skipped most often.

2. The scope, listed plainly

   Which trades were involved and what came out or went in. Structural work, mechanicals, permits pulled, anything unusual you found once the walls were open. Naming the trades you coordinated is the whole argument, made quietly.

3. A budget range, not a figure

   Nobody expects an exact number and most contractors are right to refuse one. A range, or even a band like "a mid-size addition, six figures", filters your enquiries before they cost you an hour on the phone. Say it is a range and say why.

4. The timeline, including the delay

   Start month, finish month, and one honest line about what pushed it. "Two weeks lost waiting on the electrical inspection." Admitting a delay you managed is more persuasive than a schedule that went perfectly, because nobody believes the second one.

5. Before, during, after

   The during photograph is the one that matters and the one nobody takes. Open walls, subs working, a site that is organised. That is what coordination looks like.

Write these as ordinary web pages, one project per page, with the text as real text. Not a slideshow, not a PDF case study, not a caption buried inside an image. Search engines can read the first and cannot read the last two, and a homeowner searching for "second storey addition" plus your town is describing a project page you either have or do not.

The second audience nobody plans for

Your site has two readers and most general contractors only design for one. The homeowner or developer is the obvious one. The other is a good sub deciding whether to work for you.

Subs check you out. They ask around first, but they look at the website, and what they are looking for is not the same as what the homeowner wants. They want to know how you pay, how big the jobs are, whether the schedule is realistic, and whether the site is organised or a free-for-all.

What a page for subs should say

• Which trades you are actively looking for, updated when it changes.
• The size and type of work, so people can self-select out.
• Your requirements stated up front: insurance certificates, licensing, whatever you need on file. Say what the paperwork is, and check the specifics with your own insurance adviser rather than repeating what somebody told you.
• How to get in touch, with a real address at your domain rather than a form nobody monitors.
• How and when you pay. Being straight about this is the single strongest thing you can put on that page.

This costs one page and it works on the first audience too. A homeowner who lands on it sees a company that has a bench of trades and standards for who gets on site. That is the coordination story again, told from the other side.

Who should not buy this

If you self-perform one trade and sub nothing out, this page is not describing your business, and building the site around coordination will work against you.

A remodeller who does the tile work himself and hires nobody is searching-wise a tradesman, not a general contractor. The people looking for you type the trade. They do not type "general contractor", and a site built to answer scope and schedule questions is answering questions your buyer is not asking. The contractors page covers that shape: one trade, service-area work, phone calls that need to convert quickly. It is the better fit for how your customers search.

There is also a size line in the other direction. The construction companies page is written for firms running commercial or multi-site work, with crews on payroll, prequalification packets, safety records and a bidding process that involves procurement departments. If your website has to survive being read by somebody's compliance officer, that is the page. The difference is not how good you are. It is whether your buyer is a homeowner making one decision or an organisation running a process.

And within general contracting, plenty of firms should spend less than they are being sold.

• You do not need a large plan for six project pages and a contact page.
• You do not need a managed platform to publish a project write-up. Anything you can edit yourself in ten minutes is doing the job.
• You do not need a security product on a site with no logins and no payments, though a password-protected bid area changes that slightly and is worth doing properly.
• You probably do need somebody to sit with you once and turn four finished jobs into four real project pages. That is a one-off piece of work, not a monthly charge.

Spending more earns its keep in three situations: you carry a live archive of bid documents, you run a client portal with logins, or you have several divisions on one site pulling different audiences. Volume of jobs on its own is not a reason.