Trusted Home Contractors is a site that delivers helpful advice on remodeling your home. Home remodeling articles inspire home owners on their kitchen remodeling, bathroom remodeling, roofing installation, outdoor living and more. If a project seems too difficult, the site also matches readers to actual trusted home contractors. Each experienced contractor can assist these users on any of their home improvement project.

Project Scope

I was asked to name, design, develop and maintain the web site. Not only did I do the web design/development, I also built a custom lead funnel from scratch. To make adding and editing articles the home improvement site easy for the client, I built the entire site in WordPress.

Web Design

Months earlier, I learned during an A/B test that users engage more when they see an association with ‘trusted’ and ‘contractors.’ Its understandable. Home owners want to know that they are bringing a person into their home who will do a great job and won’t con them. With that knowledge, I tried designing a site that looked trustworthy. I was even thinking of a 1950’s small town feel. I was picturing Trusted Home Contractors feeling like the user’s next door neighbor sharing their advice. I used an earthy tan for humbleness and a rich crimson for strength and reliability.

Web Development

I built a custom WordPress theme for this project. In the theme, I made the site responsive, making sure it looked good on a phone, tablet, laptop and large desktop. The largest task of this project was to build a custom lead funnel that gathers user’s inputs for contractor matching. I had to make the form look good on a normal page and a modal box, plus make both instances work on any screen size. To make the challenge even more difficult, I was asked to break the long funnel into multiple steps that would slide as a user goes from one step to the next. With a lot of tinkering with css and the Fancybox sliding api, I got it to work.

Maintenance

I am continually refactoring the site, looking for ways to speed it up or make it easy to navigate. I already replaced the WooSlider WordPress plugin with a personalized slideshow api to decrease the amount of HTTP requests and decrease the article creation process time by 5%. Not only am I continually increasing the performance of the site, but I’m also adding 4 articles to the site a month. So if you are planning on starting a home improvement project any time soon, a great place to start is TrustedHomeContractors.com.