01
Stock photos of crews that are not yours
Anyone in the industry spots a stock hard hat instantly. It signals that either you have no photos of your own work, or you did not think it mattered. Both are bad answers.
Construction website design
Website design for construction companies that answers the real question.
Every visitor arrives asking one thing: can this company handle my project? Most contractor websites never answer it. They lead with a mission statement and a photo of a hard hat that clearly is not yours.
The failure state
Six things wrong with most construction websites.
None of these are matters of taste. Each one is a specific, checkable failure that costs work — and you can audit your own site against the list in about four minutes.
02
No project list with values, scope or duration
A list of project names is not a portfolio. A procurement contact needs sector, contract value band, delivery method, duration and your actual role before they can judge whether you are a fit.
03
Certifications buried in a PDF, or absent
COR, SECOR, WCB clearance, bonding capacity, insurance limits and prequalification platform profiles belong on a page, in text, where they can be read and indexed.
04
No careers page, or a mailto link
You are competing for journeymen against every other contractor in the city. A generic contact form is not a hiring funnel, and trades will not fill one out on a phone in a truck.
05
Unreadable on a phone in daylight
Low-contrast grey text, tap targets sized for a mouse, and a five-second load on LTE. Your buyers and your applicants are both on site when they look you up.
06
"Contact us" as the only conversion path
A developer verifying a referral, a GC building a bid list and a journeyman looking for work all need different next steps. One form serves none of them well.
What we build instead
Seven components, built to be used rather than admired.
Project portfolio system
Filterable by sector, contract value band and location, running on a repeatable project template: scope, value, duration, delivery method, client type, your role, and photographs of the actual job. Adding a completed project is a ten-minute task, not a developer ticket.
Credentials module
COR and SECOR status, WCB clearance, bonding capacity, insurance limits, ISNetworld, Avetta, ComplyWorks and Cognibox profiles, association memberships, and safety statistics — TRIF and LTI — presented as structured content rather than a downloadable brochure.
Careers and recruitment pathway
Trade-specific application forms that work one-handed on a phone, an employer-brand page that says something concrete about how you run a site, and job listings that can be posted and closed without touching code.
Estimate-request flow
For residential and trade work: qualifying fields that filter out tire-kickers before they reach your estimator, plus file upload so a homeowner or a GC can attach drawings.
Prequalification-ready company profile
The single page a general contractor's admin actually needs, with a downloadable capability statement that matches what the site already says. This is the page that gets you onto the bid list.
Service-area architecture
A real page for each city you genuinely work in, with distinct content per location. Not forty thin pages generated from a template — that stopped working years ago and now actively hurts.
Speed and mobile as a functional requirement
A sub-two-second largest contentful paint on 4G, tap targets sized for work gloves, and contrast that survives direct sunlight. This is not a Core Web Vitals talking point. It is whether a foreman can use your site at all.
The platform question
WordPress, and here is the honest reason.
We build on WordPress with Elementor Pro. Not because it is fashionable — it is not — but because you can edit your own project pages without calling us, it integrates with the CRM and job board you already use, and if you fire us tomorrow, any competent developer in Calgary can pick it up.
- Wix or Squarespace — fine for a two-truck operation, genuinely limiting once you need a filterable portfolio, service-area pages and a real application flow. Migration later costs more than building right now.
- A fully custom build — faster and cleaner, but you cannot edit it, and you are tied to whoever wrote it. For most contractors that is a worse trade than it sounds.
- No lock-in either way — you own the domain, the hosting, the files and the content, and we hand over credentials without an argument.
Where this applies
The build changes by sector.
General contractors
Prequalification first: capability statement, bonding, safety record, delivery methods, trade recruitment.
Commercial & industrial
Sector pages, project value bands, named clients, ESG and safety reporting.
Home builders
Model libraries, community pages, spec versus custom pathways, warranty transparency.
Questions about the build
How much does a construction website cost?
Engagements start at CAD $7,000 for a single-trade contractor with a site of up to five pages, $15,000 for a company with three to six service lines and a couple of sector pages, and $30,000 for a multi-region build with integrations. The exact quote follows a short discovery call.
How long does a build take?
Six to ten weeks from kickoff to launch for a standard build. The single biggest cause of delay is waiting on your project photographs and certification documents, which is why we ask for them in week one rather than week six.
We have almost no photographs of our own work. Now what?
That is the most common blocker, and it is fixable. Site photography is worth a half-day with a real photographer at an active job — it costs less than most people expect and it is reusable across the website, proposals and recruiting. In the meantime we build the structure so photos drop in later without a redesign.
Can you show projects that are covered by an NDA?
Yes. We write project pages that communicate sector, value band, delivery method, duration and complexity without naming the client or showing identifiable work. Those four facts carry almost all of the credibility anyway.
Will the site be accessible?
We build to WCAG 2.1 AA: contrast minimums, keyboard navigation, visible focus states, real alt text. If you bid public-sector work this is not optional, and increasingly it appears in prequalification questionnaires.
Do you build in French as well as English?
We can structure the site for it and manage the build, but we use professional translators for the copy rather than pretending otherwise. Construction terminology does not survive machine translation.
What happens after launch?
Either you take it from there, or you move onto a maintenance plan. We would rather you took a plan, because the failure mode we see most often is a site that was accurate at launch and quietly wrong two years later.
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