Case study · Trades & local services
A contractor's website that was quietly turning work away.
D&D AllService Solutions had a website. It also had 27 broken images,
dead links in the menu, and a phone number that read
(123) 456-7890
. Here's what it took to fix, and what changed.
The problem
It looked finished. It wasn't.
The site had been put together and left. Nothing on it announced that it was broken, and that's why nobody fixed it.
Images referenced, three that existed
Every page called for photos that were never uploaded. Worse, the three real ones used relative paths, so only the homepage could display them — every service page showed broken icons instead.
Pages, each with its own stylesheet
All eleven pages linked a styles.css that did not exist, and
carried a duplicated block of inline CSS instead. Changing a single color meant
editing eleven files by hand.
Dead links in the main navigation
The homepage linked to a page that was never built. Every service page linked to a contact page at the wrong path. A visitor who wanted to get in touch could hit a dead end from seven of the eleven pages.
Placeholder details, live to the public
[email protected], (123) 456-7890 and
[Your Location/City/Region] were all still sitting in the published
copy, and the contact form submitted to nothing at all.
Before and after
Same business. Same services. Same three photos.
We didn't shoot new photos or buy stock images. The difference is all design and structure.
The homepage was the only page where the photographs worked at all.
The plumbing page. Every image it asked for was broken, so it showed none. Now each trade gets a proper sheet.
The approach
Built like a job ticket.
A trades company shouldn't look like a software startup. The whole site borrows from a work order: ruled fields, numbered line items, and a stamped call to action. It's clearly a trades business, and it looks like nothing else in the county.
The details that matter later
The part most rebuilds skip.
Nothing lost from search
- The electrical page had been published at a misspelled URL
- Renaming it would normally throw away whatever ranking it had
- A 301 redirect sends the old address to the new one permanently
- Old links, bookmarks and search results all still work
Findable in the right county
- LocalBusiness structured data with the real trades and service area
- Westchester County named in every page title and description
- A sitemap and robots.txt so all eleven pages get crawled
- Canonical URLs that match what the server actually serves
Shareable without embarrassment
- A designed social card, so a link posted to Facebook shows a real preview
- A favicon set, so a bookmark is not a blank page icon
- A branded 404 instead of the host's default error
- Correct hours, phone number and service area throughout
The result
A site that works on a phone, in the dark, at 8pm.
That's when a lot of people go looking for a contractor. Every link and image on all 11 pages was checked before launch.
“I’m blown away by the website but the most impressive thing was the easy of working with JT. Thank you so much.”
D&D AllService Solutions5-star Google review
The site is live at ddallservicesolutions.com. Click around. Every page is real.