Rebuilding our website (1): the phone was the only way in

We have rebuilt the company website. The things we agonised over while building it are being written up one by one, starting from this earlier post.

This series covers, in four parts, why we rebuilt it in the first place and how we built it. If you run a contracting firm and are thinking about the same thing, we hope it gives you something to weigh up.

Three things set it off

1. The phone was the only way in

This was the biggest reason.

The old site did have ways to get in touch, but in practice almost everything came by phone. There is nothing wrong with the phone. It just has constraints that only apply to the phone.

Someone has to be there to pick up. If we are out on site, we cannot answer, and if we call back while the other person is in a meeting, that is another call. This back and forth can take half a day.

Nothing is recorded. “You said work would start on the such-and-such.” “I never heard that figure.” Restoration is a job where you do not know what you are dealing with until you open things up, so if everything is verbal, the accounts will differ later. Every time.

It is weak across a language barrier. Our director and others here speak English and Tagalog, but the phone is the hardest format there is. No faces, no screen, and unfamiliar technical vocabulary going both ways — it is hard work for everyone involved.

A site that says “call us first” might just be convenient for the people receiving the calls. That thought is where this started.

2. The old site no longer matched reality

The other reason was simply that it had aged.

On a phone the text was small and unreadable without zooming in. The information on it had stopped being updated, and in places the address of an office we no longer have was still sitting there.

That is not a funny story — it means someone could turn up there and be put out. Leaving a site with the wrong company address up for years is, in itself, not honest.

3. It was time to take our business app outside the company

We develop our own business app, “anken.ai”, for use on our own sites. It keeps photos and progress on record and lets extra work be approved before it starts.

We are preparing to offer that app to other firms. Once we do, people will look at the site of the company that built it — “what sort of contractor makes this app?”

If what they found was a site with an out-of-date address, that would undo the whole thing. If you are going outside, sort out your own doorstep first — that was the order of things.

The one thing we settled first

Before starting, we settled on one rule.

If we cannot stand behind it, we do not write it.

Contractor websites tend to line up the same words. “High quality.” “Low prices.” “Fast response.” “Peace of mind.” None of them are wrong, but every company’s site says them, so they tell the reader nothing.

And awkwardly, once you write them they become promises. If you have written “fast response”, then being late means you broke a promise.

So we decided to write only what we actually do. That rule mattered a great deal later on. While building the site we started writing promises we could not keep and deleted them more than once.

OS Notes