How Do I Build a Website for My Construction Company?

March 22, 2023

The first step to diving into building (or rebuilding) a website is answering the question, “What is the purpose of my business website?” If you dive right into building a website without determining a purpose for it, you might end up with something cool you can show off to your friends and family, but chances are it won’t actually provide any tangible benefits to your construction company!

What are some potential purposes for a business website?

• Provide potential customers with a way to learn more about your business. When a potential customer hears about your business – whether it’s a new GC you just sent a proposal to, a referral from an existing customer or someone you had a conversation with at that trade show you attended – the first thing that potential customer is going to do is look you up online. Having a website gives them something to find (and hopefully helps persuade them you will help solve their problems!).
• Give potential employees a way to learn more about your business. Everyone loves to discuss the great construction labor shortage. A website provides a way for potential employees to find you and learn more about you.
• Generate leads. A good website can get people looking for your services to your website and provide them with a reason and a way to get in touch with you so you can turn them into customers.
• Ecommerce: If you’ve got products you’d like to sell online, you’ll need an ecommerce site to list your products and provide your customers with a way to buy them.

Depending on what you want your website to do, you’ve got some options for getting your website up and running.

If all you are looking for to start is providing potential customers and employees with a way to learn more about your business, there are a lot of website building tools that you can use to build a nice looking website in no time. Wix.com is one of our favorites.

Using a website builder like Wix has some great advantages:

• Get up and running quickly
• Inexpensive
• You can do it all yourself
• No code required

Wix and other website building tools may start to fall short though if you are really looking to build a premium website that will result in more customers for your business. SEO (search engine optimization) for sites built with website builders like Wix tends to be not as good as sites coded up with SEO in mind: this means you’ll be less likely to show up at the top of Google search results. Wix sites also have the potential to not load as quickly, and they can have less of a “custom” feel to them since they’ve been built within the confines of whatever website building tool was used, potentially using a template that hundreds or thousands of other businesses have used.

If you’ve got the money to spend and you want to build a performant website with good SEO designed to get you new customers, you can either hire a freelancer or find a web design/marketing firm. A freelancer will probably be less expensive, and if you can find the right one, give you results as good or better than going with a firm. Finding the right freelancer can be challenging however, and you could easily end up with a suboptimal website if you hire the wrong person. A web design or marketing company – especially if they specialize in your industry – will likely have processes and systems in place to build you an effective website, but you will pay for it!

One thing worth noting if you are considering going the route of a custom built website is that your website should probably be just one part of an overall marketing strategy. Having a website, no matter how nice, does not automatically mean more customers. You’ll need to drive people to your website somehow, and once they are there, convince them to get in touch with you! After they get in touch with you, you still need to turn them into a paying customer. This is getting into an area where my expertise is limited though: we’re still trying to figure out how to do marketing here at Lithium.

If you are looking to sell products online, you’ll need an ecommerce site. Shopify is the industry standard for building an online store, and you can get up and running quickly with no code. You will need to drive people to your online store though, so you’ll still need a website to connect to your store, and just like with a website, you’ll want to have some sort of marketing strategy for getting people to your store.

While there is a lot to consider when it comes to getting a website online, website building tools like Wix give you the ability to at least have a presence, so when people search for your company they can actually find you. If you’ve got nothing right now (or if your site was built in the 90s), getting a Wix site up is a great first step.

From there if you want to grow your online presence and customer base, you might consider getting a custom website designed and how that will play into an overall marketing strategy.