The challenge
Nicol Construction had been working on Salt Spring Island since 2007 on reputation alone, with no website at all. James is a Red Seal carpenter running a crew of five, building custom homes, renovations, and additions across the island. He needed an online presence that matched the quality of the work, and a way for people to see what he had actually built.
The first version went live in January. It did the job it needed to do: a real site, fast, with the crew’s wall-raising timelapse as the hero. But it was built on a platform, and platforms have a shape.
Where it hit its limit
The projects page was the problem. On the platform, it was a template gallery, which is fine until a builder wants to show builds the way builders think about them: by type, by location, by year, each one with its own set of photos. James had years of work and no proper way to put it in front of anyone.
That is what the rebuild was for. Not a redesign for its own sake, and not because the site looked dated after eight months. The projects system was the reason.
What I rebuilt
The whole site moved off the platform into custom code, and the projects system became the centre of it. Every build is a real entry now, filterable by new builds, renovations, and additions.
Each project has its own page with a full-bleed hero, the details that matter to someone comparing builders (location, year, type), and a lightbox gallery of the finished work. The homepage leads with a featured build and three more below it, so the work is the first thing a visitor sees.
The timelapse hero survived the rebuild, because it is the most honest asset any builder on the island has: James’s own crew raising a sheathed wall on a hilltop with the ocean behind them. The about page became a real story rather than a paragraph, with the timeline from moving to the island in 1994 to the crew of five today.
A rebuild is also a chance to fix what nobody had noticed. The old site still had template placeholder pages live, a typo in the cell number, a “years in business” counter that never fired for some visitors, and a sitemap that returned a 404. All of it is gone. James’s BC Housing builder licence, which had been sitting unused, is now on the site and in its structured data, where it does real work for anyone comparing builders.
The result
nicolconstruction.ca now runs on a fast custom build with a projects system James can actually grow into. It loads quickly on a rural connection, it works properly on a phone on a job site, and it puts nineteen years of finished work in front of anyone deciding who to call.
“Owen built our website and did a great job. He listened to what we wanted, made thoughtful suggestions, and delivered a good looking, professional website.”
— James Nicol, Nicol Construction