The local service website in my portfolio started as a rebuild, not a new project. The business had a site already. It had been built five years earlier, it worked, and it was quietly costing them calls.
I want to walk through what was wrong and what changed, because the problems were ordinary ones. If you run a service business, there is a reasonable chance your own site has at least two of them.
What the Old Site Looked Like
Five pages: Home, About Us, Services, Gallery, Contact. A rotating banner at the top of the homepage with three messages. A paragraph headed “Welcome to our website” underneath. Services listed as eleven bullet points, no descriptions. The phone number appeared once, in the footer, as part of an image.
On a phone the banner took up the entire first screen, and the navigation menu opened as a list of eleven items you had to scroll inside.
Nothing here is a disaster. That is the point. The site looked fine to the owner, who visited it on a desktop monitor roughly twice a year.
What the Owner Actually Told Me
Before touching anything, I asked what work they wanted more of and what they wanted less of. This conversation changes projects more than any design decision.
Two of the eleven listed services accounted for most of the revenue. Three of them the owner actively disliked taking on, kept only because they were on the list, and would happily have stopped. Two more had not been offered in over a year and were still advertised.
So the first change was not visual at all. The service list went from eleven items to five, ordered by what the business wanted more of.
The Structural Changes
The banner came out. In its place, one line naming the service and the county, a short sentence underneath, and a call button. On a phone that whole block now fits above the fold with room to spare.
The phone number moved into the header as real text, so tapping it dials. That single change is the one I would recommend to any local service business before anything else on this list.
The two main services each got their own page: what the job involves, what is included, roughly what it costs, how long it takes, and photos of finished work. The remaining three stayed as short blocks on a single services page.
The gallery, which had been eighty photos in no order, became about twenty grouped by service type, each with one line explaining what the job was. Fewer photos, more useful.
The contact form lost four fields. It had been asking for company name, preferred contact time, how the visitor heard about the business, and a subject line. Now it asks for a name, a phone or email, and a description of the job.
The Part That Took Longest
Not the design. Collecting proof.
The old site had no reviews, no license details, and no photos of the crew. Getting three customers to write two sentences each took about two weeks of the owner asking, forgetting, and asking again. Getting decent photos of completed jobs meant waiting for the next few to finish.
If you are planning a rebuild, start gathering this material before the design work begins. It is the piece that holds up launches, and no layout compensates for its absence.
What Changed Afterwards
I want to be careful here, because this is where case studies usually start inventing numbers.
What the owner reported after a few months was a change in the kind of enquiry rather than a flood of new ones. Fewer calls asking about services the business no longer wanted. More messages that arrived with enough detail to quote from. The form submissions got longer, which makes sense once the form stops treating the visitor like a database record.
Whether total traffic rose, I genuinely do not know. Nobody had analytics on the old site, so there was no baseline to compare against. Installing analytics is now the first thing I do on a rebuild, before any changes, precisely so the next conversation can be about numbers instead of impressions.
If You Are Looking at Your Own Site
Three things from this project transfer to almost any local service business, and none of them require a rebuild to start:
- Make the phone number tappable text in the header today.
- Cut the service list down to the work you want more of.
- Remove every form field that is not a name, a contact method, and a message.
If those three improve things, the rest of the rebuild has an easier case to make.