Case study · Full site rebuild
A ten-year-old contractor,
finally with a site to match the work.
Perk General Contracting builds everything from basement finishes to Audi dealerships. Their website showed almost none of it. We rebuilt it from the ground up — same brand, same colors, a completely different impression.
- Client
- Perk General Contracting
- Owner
- Nikolaus Perkovich
- Based in
- Des Moines, Iowa
- Scope
- Design, build, copy, SEO
- Live at
- perkgc.com
The short version
What the rebuild changed
Every number here is measured against the old site, which you can still open and click through below.
Home, Services, Gallery, About, Reviews and Contact — each one a page people actually search for.
Grouped by residential, commercial and agricultural, with photo counts and before/after sets.
Front-end code on the homepage, across 3 files instead of 38. Photos excluded from both figures.
Titles, descriptions, canonical tags, a sitemap and contractor schema on every page.
Where it started
The site was doing the business a disservice
Nikolaus Perkovich has been building in central Iowa since 2014 — pole barns first, then remodels, additions, custom cabinetry, commercial build-outs, and full dealership facilities for national automotive brands. Ten years of work, six states, and an unusually loyal set of customers.
The website was a stock template that had gone stale. Three links in the navigation. An About page that was a name and two sentences. A services list that was two bare bullet columns with no explanation of anything. The footer still read © 2024.
The gallery was the clearest symptom. Ninety-odd photos spread across
six category pages — Kitchen, Bathroom,
Basement, and so on — with no captions, no project names, and
no way to tell that eight of those photos were one job. Every image
was labelled with its raw camera filename
(2R0A4105.jpg) or a Facebook export string. A visitor
could scroll a wall of nice-looking rooms and still leave knowing
nothing about a single project.
And the biggest gap: the dealership and commercial work — Audi, Volkswagen, Acura, BMW of Des Moines — appeared nowhere. An entire revenue line was invisible to anyone searching for it.
The work was excellent. The site made it look like a one-man handyman operation. That gap was the whole brief.
It was also heavy in a way visitors feel. The old homepage shipped a 947 KB HTML document and pulled in another 5.4 MB of template CSS and JavaScript across 37 files — page-builder machinery, not content. On a phone on a job site, that is a long wait for a page that says very little.
See for yourself
The old site and the new one, side by side
Both are fully browsable. Load either preview to scroll and click around, or open it full-size in a new tab.
Template build, three nav links, uncaptioned photo galleries.
Open full size ↗Six pages, a filterable project gallery, quote and review forms.
Open full size ↗
The “before” panel is an archived copy of the previous site kept for
comparison, hosted here at old-site/ and marked
noindex so it never competes with the client’s live pages
in search. Previews render at desktop width and are scaled to fit.
Point by point
What actually changed
The details a visitor never consciously notices — and feels immediately.
| Old site | New site | |
|---|---|---|
| Navigation | About, Gallery, Contact. Services and reviews had no page of their own. | Home, Services, Gallery, About, Reviews, Contact — plus a persistent “Get a Quote” button. |
| Services | Two bullet lists headed RESIDENTIAL and COMMERCIAL. No descriptions. | A dedicated page: six categories, each with a plain-English description and its own anchor link. |
| Gallery | Six flat category pages of uncaptioned photos. No project names, no dates, no context. | 16 named projects, filterable by type, with photo counts, before/after sets and shareable per-project links. |
| Commercial work | One unlabelled “Commercial” photo page. Dealership clients never mentioned. | A commercial section on the homepage and named dealership projects — Audi, Volkswagen, Acura, BMW of Des Moines. |
| About | A name and two sentences. | A real story — rural Iowa roots, how the company grew, and what “one accountable team” means for a client. |
| Reviews | Five quotes buried on the homepage. No way for a customer to add one. | A dedicated reviews page, star ratings, and a form so happy customers can leave their own. |
| Search & SEO | Title was just “PERK GENERAL CONTRACTING”. Meta description empty. Image alt text was camera filenames. No sitemap. | Descriptive titles and descriptions per page, real alt text, canonical tags, sitemap.xml, robots.txt, and GeneralContractor structured data. |
| Page weight | 947 KB of HTML plus 5.4 MB of template CSS/JS across 37 files. | 56 KB of HTML, one 40 KB stylesheet, one 17 KB script. |
| Getting a quote | A single contact form on a single page. | Quote calls-to-action on every page, a click-to-call number, and a project-specific quote form. |
The build
Decisions behind the redesign
A page for every question
People don’t search for “gallery” — they search for kitchen remodelers, deck builders, commercial contractors. Splitting the site into six focused pages gave each of those questions somewhere to land, instead of forcing everything through one scroll.
Photos became projects
The single biggest change. The same photo library was reorganised into 16 named jobs with categories, photo counts and before/after comparisons. A visitor can now see one project start to finish instead of guessing which pictures belong together.
Built to be found
Every page got a written title and description, images got real alt text, and the site ships a sitemap plus structured data describing Perk as a general contractor — the location, phone number, founder and service areas Google looks for.
Fast on a job site
No page builder, no framework, no template runtime. Hand-written HTML with one stylesheet and one script, served from a CDN — so it loads on a phone with two bars of signal in the middle of a build.
The commercial side, finally visible
Dealership build-outs are some of Perk’s most impressive work and had no presence at all. They now get a homepage section, a service category, and named projects — so a commercial buyer can see the standard of work before the first call.
Copy that sounds like Nikolaus
The old site’s best line — “a strong work ethic with an Iowa nice attitude” — was worth keeping. We built the voice of the new site around it rather than replacing it with generic contractor marketing.
Continuity
A rebuild, not a rebrand
Perk had brand equity worth protecting. The goal was for a returning customer to recognise the company instantly — and just think it looked better.
The deep navy
Carried straight over as the primary surface colour.
The orange accent
Still the accent on headings, links and calls-to-action.
The barn logo
Unchanged, with “Est. 2014” kept as a mark of experience.
Bold condensed type
The industrial, all-caps feel of the original headings.
Every customer review
All five original testimonials kept, word for word.
Willow Crest Homes
The sister company still gets its own callout and link.
Where it landed
The site finally matches the standard of the work
Perk General Contracting now has a website a commercial client can be sent to without a caveat. Someone arriving from a Google search can find what Perk does, see a named project in that exact category, read what past customers said, and request a quote — without ever hunting for it.
The old site asked visitors to take the quality on faith. The new one shows them. Same company, same colours, same Iowa-nice voice — just presented the way ten years of craftsmanship deserves.
Aura Concepts continues to host and maintain the site under a care plan, so new projects go into the gallery as they finish.
Your turn
Is your site the weakest part of your business?
If your work is better than your website makes it look, that’s a fixable problem. Tell us about your business and we’ll reply within one business day with a straight answer on cost.