The challenge
Charlie’s Excavating and Septic Services has been working on Salt Spring for years, running the machines behind a lot of what gets built here: septic systems, foundations and site prep, rock breaking, driveways, retaining walls, land clearing. The work has come steadily through word of mouth and the phone keeps ringing, so a website was never the urgent thing.
They did own the domain. charliesexcavating.ca had been sitting there for a while, forwarding to a Facebook page nobody had time to keep current. Everything that belonged on a website was instead sitting in photos on phones.
There was a second thing underneath that one. Septic and excavation are two different phone calls. Someone with a failing septic field and someone clearing a building lot want different information, and the site had to answer both without making either of them dig for it.
The office at Charlie’s handled the project from their side: pulling photos together, checking details with Charles, and deciding what belonged on each page.
What I built
A four-page site where every photograph is a Charlie’s job. No stock images anywhere on it.
The homepage runs the services in order, numbered, with a photo of that work beside each: septic installation, septic repairs and replacement, excavation and site prep, rock breaking, retaining and rock walls, driveways and pathways, land clearing and forest roads. Rock breaking sits in the middle of that list for a reason. On this island it is often the thing that decides what a job costs.
The photos are shown at a size that suits them. They were taken on job sites at the end of long days, on phones, and they hold up well given room rather than stretched across a full screen.
The projects page is the photo library they already had, organized and captioned to what each picture actually shows: storm mains and manhole sections going into an open trench, a gravel driveway cut through standing timber with the compactor still on it, timber felled and decked beside a freshly cut road under light snow.
There is also a short section on what tends to be under a Salt Spring property, because it comes up on nearly every job: thin soil over bedrock, the fact that every onsite septic system in BC has to be planned and filed with Island Health, and how access decides which machine can reach a site. Charles is a Registered Onsite Wastewater Practitioner, the qualification that matters on the septic side, and the site says so plainly.
The result
charliesexcavating.ca now points at their own site, with a contact form that delivers straight to their inbox and an address and service area a caller can actually find.
The brief at the start was a basic site they could add to over time, so the whole thing runs on a simple dashboard. The day it went live, the office logged in and made the first edit themselves, and it published to the live site without me touching anything. New job photos go up the same way, whenever there are new ones worth showing.
“Thank you so much for your help with this! It’s about time we did this!!”
— Charlie’s Excavating