A website is not a brochure. It's the first person your customer meets.
It answers the phone before you do. It decides whether the person holding the phone keeps dialing or goes back to the search results. Most of the ones around here were built once, by someone who has since moved on, and have been answering for the business ever since.
What changed while you weren't looking.
Not opinion. Published research, credited where it came from.
0% 0%
In one year, the share of consumers who used AI tools to get local business recommendations went from 6% to 45%.
BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 · 1,002 US adults
This is the whole argument in one number. People are no longer only searching — they are asking. If an assistant can't read your site, it can't recommend you, and you are not in the answer at all.
0%
searched for a local business online in the last three months.
BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026
0%
of people who run a "near me" search on a phone visit a business within 24 hours.
Google / Think with Google, 2016
0%
won't consider a business with fewer than 20 reviews. The share who use only businesses rated 4.5 stars and up nearly doubled in a year, from 17% to 31%.
BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026
None of this asks you to be flashy. It asks you to be findable, readable, and fast enough that the person looking doesn't give up.
Five steps. You see the end of every one.
-
01
Audit
We score what you have now — speed, mobile, search, whether an AI assistant can even read you. You get the number and the list before you've paid anything.
-
02
Research
Your crews, your equipment, the jobs you want more of, and what the outfit down the road is already beating you on. Written down and agreed before anything is designed.
-
03
Direction
Three real comps, not one take-it-or-leave-it. You pick the one that looks like your outfit before a single line of the site exists.
-
04
Build
It goes up live, at a URL you can open on your phone the same day. No staging portal, no screenshots in an email. You watch it get built.
-
05
Gate
It does not ship until it passes, automatically: color contrast measured not eyeballed, load speed, every tap target on a phone, schema Google can parse, and every claim on the page traced back to something you told us. A page that fails goes back. Every time, no exceptions.
What "good" measures.
Design opinions are cheap. These are the ones with a number attached, and we check every one of them before your site goes live.
- Contrast
- Every text color is computed against the exact surface it sits on, to the WCAG AA threshold. Not "looks readable to me" — a ratio. Text that fails gets changed before anyone sees it.
- Speed
- It has to open fast on a phone with two bars, in a truck, outside of town. That is the real device your customer is holding, not a desk with fibre.
- Thumb reach
- Every phone number is a tap target big enough to hit with a work glove on. The whole path from "found you" to "calling you" is one thumb, so it gets measured like it matters.
- 375 pixels
- The narrowest phone still in real use. The page is checked at that width for sideways scroll and for text jammed against the edge of the screen — the two failures people describe as "it looks broken on my phone".
- Schema
- Your trade, service area, hours and phone number written in the structured format Google and the AI assistants actually read, instead of leaving them to guess from your paragraphs.
- Truth
- Every claim on the page traces to something you told us — years in business, licenses, certifications, crew size. Nothing gets invented to fill a gap in the layout.
Three outfits, three different problems.
Sample builds, made to show the work — not client sites, and not real companies.
-
Excavation & site work
Kettle Ridge Excavation
One page, one phone number, and the three jobs they want most above the fold. Photos of real dirt instead of stock photos of a handshake.
-
Mechanical & HVAC
Palouse Mechanical
Built around the after-hours call: the number is the first thing on the screen at 9pm, and the service area is stated in words a search engine can match.
-
Concrete & flatwork
Bitterroot Concrete
A page per pour type, because each one is a separate search someone in the county is typing, and one combined "Services" page wins none of them.
Start with the number.
We score the site you have now against everything on this page, tell you what it's costing you, and show you what we'd build instead. No charge and no pressure — if the answer is that your site is fine, we'll say so.
Get my free auditOr read what we can automate once the site is up: AI automation →