Your Website Is Not a Brochure

I looked at 40 contractor websites in New Brunswick last month. Thirty-seven of them were basically the same. A hero image of a truck or a house. A paragraph nobody reads about how the company was "founded on the principles of quality and integrity." A services page with no detail. A contact page buried three clicks deep.

These aren't websites. They're digital pamphlets. And they generate roughly the same number of leads as an actual pamphlet you'd leave in a coffee shop. Close to zero.

A website has a job

That job is not to exist. It's not to make you feel good when you show it to your uncle at Christmas. It's to convert strangers into customers. Period.

Every element on the page should serve that job. The headline should tell someone in 3 seconds what you do and where. The first thing they see should be a way to contact you. The content should answer the one question every visitor has: "Is this person going to solve my problem?"

If your site doesn't do those things within 5 seconds of landing, you've lost them. They hit the back button. They call your competitor. You never even knew they existed.

What a working website looks like

I worked with an excavation company in Quispamsis last spring. Their old site was gorgeous. Custom photography. Smooth animations. Won some kind of local design award. It generated about 2 leads per month.

We rebuilt it ugly by comparison. Plain. Fast. Phone number massive across the top. A form right in the hero. Three bullet points: what they do, where they do it, and why they're booked 3 weeks out. No animations. No company history above the fold.

It generates 15 to 20 leads a month now. Same business. Same services. Different approach to the website.

The difference wasn't better design. It was understanding that the site had a job and stripping away everything that didn't serve it.

Ask yourself this

If someone lands on your homepage right now on their phone, can they call you in one tap? Can they see what you do and where without scrolling? Is there any reason for them to stay longer than 10 seconds?

If the answer to any of those is no, you don't have a website. You have a brochure. And brochures don't ring phones.