Newest Contractors Website

When Matt and Rachel Neal came to Mitro Digital Marketing seeking our services, their old website was looking a bit the worse for wear. It felt outdated, and it was no longer what they wanted. Teuta consulted with them, getting the details we needed to start the project. After taking some inspiration from their original site as well as another site, we began the task of rebuilding the Neal Contracting website from scratch. This is the newest contractors website we’ve designed.

We started with a simple mockup of about five pages for the site, designed by Michelle, each with a slightly different general layout. The home page was the most simplistic of the bunch, with only a background image, foreground text, and a footer. Next came pages for the company’s information and history, a contact form, services, and a portfolio. Jace was put in charge of coding the site and making it look like the mock up. This took about 1-2 weeks, and although the site was beginning to take shape, it was still missing some key elements like content for the company page and images for the portfolio page.

After we got more materials needed for completing the site, we began implementing more advanced features. The contact form was made more secure and responsive, an image slider was added to each house in the portfolio, the services page was merged with the company page, and numerous mobile updates were made. The company page also got some back-end JavaScript to make it more responsive.

The portfolio images the Neals provided us with were professionally taken by Shooters at the Beach, and as such their high quality put a bit of a load on the servers. Using Google tools, we optimized the images as much as we could while still maintaining the highest quality possible.

The Neals were impressed with the initial layout, but it wasn’t completely what they were looking for, so we consulted once more and implemented some tweaks that they wanted, including some updates to the homepage, the page headers, and a completely built from scratch, navigable image gallery. The footer got a makeover as well; sponsor links were added and certain elements were re-positioned for a better user experience.

Once everything was ready to go, we began the process of migrating the site to a new hosting system. The Neals wished to use their original domain, so we set up all the new files on the old domain with the hosting, erasing the old site. It took about 24 hours for the DNS system to refresh with the new site, but once that was done, we did a final check of all pages and files to ensure everything was ready to go.

The only major thing we wanted to modify after the site was launched was the superfluous header and footer code in each of the back-end page files. We removed that code from each page and condensed it into separate header and footer files. We then used PHP to include these universal files on the main page files. This improved the website in multiple ways. First, it reduced clutter in the code, and second, it is a better practice than having nearly identical code repeated on every page. With the site complete, the only possible major improvement will be to add a database for storing blog posts.

The Neals are delighted with the final product and are excited to show off their new site, spotlighting on their portfolio that shows off their talent in craftsmanship and attention to detail.