You are good at the work. The trouble is everything around it.
The phone rings while you are on a ladder. A quote request sits in an inbox until Friday. You drive forty minutes to look at a job that was never going to happen. You do extra work on site because the customer asked nicely, and it never makes it onto the invoice. And your website, if you have one, looks fine and does almost nothing: some photos, a phone number, a contact form that goes who knows where.
You do not need a prettier website. You need one that goes looking for the jobs you want and hands them to you in a state you can price.
Why we start with the website
For most contractors the website is the right first thing to fix, for a plain reason: it is where the work comes in. Everything downstream (the estimate, the job, the invoice) depends on the right people finding you and asking for a price. Fix that first, and everything after it has more to work with. Software for running jobs is a bigger decision, and it makes more sense once you can see the work arriving.
So we lead with the website. For a contractor who wants it, the software comes next, and the two are built to fit together.
What we build for contractors
The website
- A page for each kind of job you want more of. Decks, kitchens, additions, concrete: each with your own photos of that work and its own estimate request. A homeowner looking for a deck builder lands on a page about decks, not a list of twelve services.
- Where you work, said plainly. Your towns, clearly, so a homeowner sees theirs at once. We only write a page for a town when there is something true to say about working there.
- An estimate request that asks what you need to price the job. The street address, what they want done, and photos from their phone. You know before you drive out whether it is your kind of job.
- Call and Estimate within reach on every page, on a phone, because that is where plenty of homeowners will find you.
- A site you own. Your domain, your site, your leads. If you ever leave us, it goes with you.
The software, when you are ready
For one general contractor in Northern Virginia, Forging Solutions, we built the website and the software behind it as one system. That is not a package we sell off a shelf; it is what we built for one business, and it shows what the second step can look like:
- Estimate requests from the website land as leads in their own software, with the address and photos attached.
- Estimates carry a real cost on every line, set against their subcontractors' quotes, so the margin on each line and each job is visible.
- A salesperson can say a task out loud into their phone from the job site, and it lands in the office's task list. Change orders go to the customer as a link to review and sign.
- Contracts can be invoiced in stages through the job.
- Their dumpster rental side runs off the same website: customers pick dates, sign the rental agreement and pay online, and the booking checks that a bin is free first.
Your version would be built around how your business runs, not theirs.
Marketing
What we build for marketing is the part you own: a landing page on your own site for your ads to point at, instead of one someone else hosts; the tracking that tells you which estimate requests came from which ad; and reporting that sets what you spend against the jobs it brought in. We build and measure. We do not run your ad campaigns, and we will not promise you rankings, traffic or a number of leads.
What it looks like when it works
This is the sequence we build for. It is a description of how the pieces fit, not a promise of results.
- A homeowner finds you on their phone, searching for the job they want done in their town, and lands on your page for that job.
- They see your work, your towns and what happens if they ask, in the first screen.
- They send an estimate request with their address, what they want and a few photos. The screen tells them when you will call.
- You see it at once, wherever you are, with everything you need to decide whether it is worth a visit.
- If you run on our software, the request is already the start of the estimate. When you win the job, the same record becomes the job, then any change orders, then the invoices. Nobody retypes the customer's details, and nothing done on site falls between the job and the bill.
Steps one to four are the website. Step five is where the software comes in.
What we will not do for you
- Sell you leads. We do not run a lead marketplace or share your enquiries with other contractors. Every request from your site is yours.
- Fill your site with copies. No twenty town pages with the name swapped. They tell a homeowner nothing about working with you.
- Use stock photos of other people's work. If you do not have good photos of your own, we will tell you how to get them.
- Rent you your own website. No platform you cannot leave. What we build, you own.
- Build software you do not need yet. If a website is the fix, that is what we will recommend. Software is a second conversation, not an upsell.
- Race to the cheapest quote. We bid the job with one written estimate, and that is the price. If you are collecting quotes to pick the lowest, we are not the right fit.
Built by us
You can see two sites we have built for businesses that do this kind of work, and what we built into each: Forging Solutions and White Shovel Landscapes.
For more on the part most websites miss, read what a contractor's site has to do after the form. For the change-order side, read how to get paid for change orders. If you rent dumpsters too, read how to take dumpster bookings online.
See your homepage before you pay anything
Tell us about your business and we will design your new homepage free, so you can see it before you spend anything. We'll call you within one business day to talk it through.