Content Marketing Today

7 Simple Steps to Improve a Small Construction Company Website

HK construction, LLC. Is a Fort Myers Florida based construction company with a website that could be dramatically better with a modest level of investment in money, time, thinking, and design.

The site provides some good basic information about the company that is combined with visuals that appear to represent the kind of construction work it does.

This is a very basic site with just six main pages. Making meaningful content improvements would be simple, fast, and inexpensive.  If they were my client, this is what I would tell them to do:

1. Take the entire site and rebuild it using WordPress.  This is the most fundamentally important change because it would enable them to provide current information about the projects they have completed, news they had generated, and customer praise. As noted below, they don’t appear to have kept the site very current.  Like so many small businesses, their site would require the assistance of their Web developer to update. That can be expensive, time-consuming, and all too often impossible–when small website developers disappear. 
2. The company talks about its capabilities but only at the very bottom of the screen.  Unfortunately valuable top-level space is taken up by a list of contractor permits and a picture of the owner apparently talking to one of his staffers at a construction site.  Instead, they should put a description of why we would be in good hands if we chose them as our contractor at the very top of the site.  They need to make it clear that they understand our challenges as customers and that they are fully capable of meeting those challenges.
3. Also at the top of the site, they should add rotating images of the many construction projects they have completed, along with brief text descriptions.
4. In the about us section, they simply provide pictures of its management and staff with brief bios. Instead, they should talk about the ways in which the company has benefited its clients– such as its ability to bring in projects on time and under budget or what ever they know to be most important to those clients. They should have a separate page or section for the staff bios; these are important but they should not be the only thing you see on the about us page.
5. There is a photos page which requires visitors to take two steps to actually look at the pictures.  In fact, you have to guess which of two lines of text you should click on to action see the pictures.  Change this page so that it becomes an appealing gallery of project photographs which are immediately visible.
6. There is a press page with just two items, the most recent of which is from September of 2007.  As a company, unless you are willing to provide regularly updated news or press releases on your site, it’s better not to have them at all.  The dearth of announcements makes it look like they simply don’t get any press and therefore have almost nothing to post.
7. There is a testimonials page with, sadly, no testimonials at all.  Obviously, this page should simply disappear until they can provide testimonials.  Since these folks have been in business quite a while, we can be certain that they have plenty of customers who would be happy to provide such testimonials.  Someone just needs to take the time to go and get them.

The fixes to this site could probably be done by a reasonably talented WordPress savvy designer in much less than a day and probably for about $1-$2000.  Of course, there is also the need to improve the content marketing elements.  But that is really a conceptual task which requires the owners to communicate exactly how they can provide appropriate, timely, and affordable construction solutions for their clients.  It also requires them to think a bit differently about how they present their visual content.

These seven small changes would make a dramatic difference in the effectiveness of what should be the most important marketing tool in this companies arsenal.  And, as we say all too often, it’s not about the money, it’s about the mindset.