Web design for general contractors.
A remodel is a six-figure decision researched for months. Most contractor sites hand the homeowner eight photos and a phone number.
A remodel or custom build is a six-figure decision researched for months — eight photos and a phone number is not enough information for a homeowner to award that job.
Handymen, specialty subs, and full general contractors all fight over the same search terms, so a site that never states scope or minimum job size spends the week quoting work it does not want.
Estimating time is the real cost of a bad lead. Every unqualified walkthrough is half a day that could have gone to a signed project.
New-construction and remodel demand swing with rates and the housing cycle — the firms that stay booked through the downswing are the ones already ranking when it starts.
What a contractor is actually choosing between
The first decision is whether to build search visibility while the referral pipeline is still full. Most established general contractors run on referrals and treat the website as a formality — which works until the cycle turns and the referral flow thins at exactly the moment every competitor is also looking for work. Rankings take months to establish. The firms that stay booked through a downswing built that visibility while they were busy and did not need it.
The second is lead quality against lead volume. Estimating is the expensive part of this business: every unqualified walkthrough is half a day gone. A contractor site's job is as much to disqualify as to attract, and the sites that state scope, minimum job size, and service area plainly produce fewer, better calls. Most contractors instinctively resist this, and it is usually the change with the fastest payback.
The third is which buyer the site is for. New construction, whole-house remodel, insurance restoration, and light commercial are four different customers with four different searches, objections, and closing conversations. A site that tries to serve all four says nothing specific to any of them, and specificity is the whole basis for winning a six-figure job against two other bidders.
The build,
piece by piece.
Project pages, not a gallery
Each significant project as its own page: scope, duration, the constraints the job actually presented, and how the finished result was reached. A homeowner comparing three contractors is reading for evidence of judgment. Photographs alone do not carry it.
Scope and minimum job size, published
Stated plainly so a whole-house remodeler stops fielding calls about a bathroom fan. It is the rare change that raises revenue by reducing lead volume, and it costs nothing but the willingness to turn work away in public.
City × service matrix for the markets actually worked
Per-city, per-service pages for the towns the crews genuinely reach, each carrying real local data rather than a swapped place name across twenty identical pages. The pattern runs live on this studio's HVAC, painting, and plumbing platforms.
Grant-cycle and storm-response capture
Strengthen Alabama Homes pays toward FORTIFIED work on a first-come, first-served basis, and the portal moves fast. A page live and indexed before the window opens catches a surge that most of the market watches go past.
Traffic is not the job.
Booked work is.
Real projects with real constraints
The lot that had drainage problems, the historic facade that had to stay, the occupied remodel with a family living upstairs. Constraints are what demonstrate judgment, and judgment is what a homeowner is buying when the bids are within a few percent of each other.
Process and payment schedule, written down
Draw schedule, change-order handling, who manages subs, what happens when something is discovered behind a wall. Homeowners have heard the horror stories. The contractor who addresses them before being asked converts far better than the one who waits for the objection.
License, insurance, and bonding, forward
Stated with numbers where they are public, not buried in a footer. In a trade where an unlicensed competitor is always bidding lower, verifiable credentials are a conversion asset rather than a compliance formality.
An honest answer on timeline
Current lead time and typical project duration for the work at hand. Contractors resist publishing it because it changes. Publishing a range with a stated as-of date beats saying nothing — the homeowner is going to ask on the first call anyway, and the honest number filters out the ones who needed it done last month.
Straight answer: CDS has not shipped a general contractor or home builder site. The city-by-service matrix, the FORTIFIED grant-cycle pages, and the storm-response automation described above run live for HVAC, painting, and plumbing companies in these same two counties — the transfer is direct, and the first GC client gets a builder who tells them they are first.
Where water has actually cost money on this coast
Contractors on the Gulf Coast do restoration and rebuild work whether or not they market it, and the volume is not evenly distributed across these two counties. This studio pulled every paid National Flood Insurance Program claim in Mobile and Baldwin County from FEMA's public API — 34,861 claims and $1.03 billion paid between January 1978 and June 2026 — and published it by ZIP code, by named storm, and by cause of damage.
Two results are directly useful for planning a service area. Hurricane Ivan, not Katrina, leads the record in these counties: 6,699 paid claims and $351.9 million, against Katrina's 5,629 claims and $287.9 million. And the losses are concentrated — the ZIP-level breakdown shows which parts of Mobile and Baldwin carry the claim history and which do not, which is a better basis for choosing target markets than a radius drawn around the shop.
The limits matter as much as the findings. The NFIP pays for flood only. Wind damage, and everything else a homeowners policy covers, sits entirely outside this dataset, and none of these dollars are construction spending. It is a map of where water has cost money — a genuinely useful input to a service-area and content plan, and not an estimate of anything else.
Up to $10,000 per home toward a FORTIFIED roof, regardless of income. Next windows: Mobile County opens 2026-07-07 at 9:00 a.m. CT; Baldwin County opens 2026-07-09 at 9:00 a.m. CT — first-come, first-served, and the portals sell out fast. Strengthen Alabama Homes grant award schedule (as of 2026-07-01)
Baldwin County (the Daphne-Fairhope-Foley MSA) is the 6th fastest-growing metro area in the United States. US Census Bureau population estimates, via Gulf Coast Media (March 2026) (as of 2026-03-26)
Baldwin County's population reached 267,761 on July 1, 2025 — up 6,109 in one year, a 2.3%/yr growth rate nearly four times the Alabama state average, on pace to crack 300,000 by the 2030 census. US Census Bureau Vintage 2025 estimates (released 2026-03-26), via FOX10 News (as of 2026-03-26)
The competitive field is countable: 481 specialty-trade contractors with paid employees in Baldwin County and 514 in Mobile County — the businesses all fighting for the same local searches. US Census County Business Patterns 2023, NAICS 238 (Specialty Trade Contractors) (as of 2026-07-01)
From general contractor demand to a working scope.
See the service model, relevant proof, search operation, and pricing guide before deciding what fits.
Direct answers,
before the first call.
Should a general contractor publish prices?
Not a price list — the work is too variable and a wrong number is worse than no number. Publish the things that are stable: minimum job size, typical project range for each service, what drives a number up, and how change orders are handled. That gives a homeowner enough to self-qualify, which is the actual goal. Contractors who publish nothing get compared purely on the bid, and that is the comparison the least careful competitor wins.
How many project pages does a contractor site need?
Fewer, better ones. Ten projects documented properly — scope, constraints, process, real photography — outperform sixty thumbnails in a gallery, because each one is a page that can rank and each one demonstrates something. Add projects as they finish rather than trying to backfill a portfolio in one push, and photograph them while the job is open instead of trying to reconstruct it later.
What does a contractor website cost?
Focused builds start at $6,000. Most comparable local-service scopes are planned around a $12,500 build and $1,500 a month to operate. A contractor build lands where it lands based on how many cities and trades are genuinely covered, whether project documentation exists or has to be produced, and whether an existing site has to be migrated with its rankings intact. Every project is quoted in writing before work starts.
Has this studio built a general contractor website?
No. The portfolio covers HVAC, painting, plumbing, water treatment, a multi-location medical practice, and a B2B services company — trades that share the service-area architecture and the local-search mechanics, but not a general contractor or home builder. A GC hiring this studio would be the first in the vertical.
The city pages below carry the sourced market data — population, incomes, housing stock — behind each recommendation:
Send the business name
and the markets you serve.
Builds from $6,000 · Care plans from $1,500/mo · Fixed numbers in writing