Deschutes General Contracting: From Instagram Feed to Lead-Generating Website

Deschutes General Contracting is a hands-on remodel contractor and builder serving homeowners across Pierce and Thurston Counties in Washington. They do kitchen and bathroom remodels, room additions and new builds, decks and outdoor living, windows, and interior finish work. Before this project, the business’s only real online presence was an Instagram account full of great project photos. We turned that feed into a complete website — design, build, launch, email authentication, SEO and security — with the whole site live on its own domain at deschutesgc.com.

Visit the live site →

The starting point: great work, nowhere to send people

Contractors win jobs on trust. A homeowner who hears about a builder from a neighbor will almost always look them up before calling, and an Instagram profile alone doesn’t answer the questions they have: What exactly do you do? Do you work in my area? Are you licensed? What do other customers say? How do I get an estimate? The goal for the site was to answer every one of those questions on a single, fast page and make the next step — calling or requesting a free estimate — obvious from anywhere on the page.

The hero leads with the service area, a clear promise and two calls to action

Building the brand from the Instagram feed

We went through the @deschutesgeneralcontracting feed and pulled the strongest finished-project photos: a blue shaker kitchen, a spa-style bathroom with a freestanding tub, tile showers, a custom vanity, a room addition in progress, a new deck, window installs and interior paint. Eleven images made the cut, each cropped and converted to WebP so they look sharp without slowing the page down.

The color palette comes straight from the company’s mountain logo: a deep navy for headers and dark sections, a forest green for buttons and accents, and a warm stone background that keeps the page feeling like a craftsman’s business rather than a tech startup. Headlines are set in Oswald — tall, condensed and a little industrial, which suits construction — paired with Inter for easy-to-read body text.

One page, organized the way homeowners decide

For a small contractor, a focused single-page site beats a sprawling one. Every section answers the next question a homeowner is likely to have, in order, and the sticky header keeps the “Free Estimate” button on screen the whole way down.

• Sticky header with the logo, section links and a green Free Estimate button, collapsing to a hamburger menu on phones
• Hero with the service area (Pierce County · Thurston County), the headline “Remodels & builds done right, start to finish,” two calls to action and three quick trust points: Licensed, Local and one team from design to final walkthrough
• Services: six photo cards for kitchens, bathrooms, additions and new builds, decks and outdoor living, windows and doors, and interior finishes
• About section explaining the name (the Deschutes River runs through Olympia) and a checklist of what customers can count on: licensed, bonded and insured, detailed written estimates, clean job sites and a workmanship guarantee
• Project gallery in a masonry grid with a click-to-enlarge lightbox
• A simple, honest process: four numbered steps from the first call to the final walkthrough
• Google reviews with the 5.0 rating and full customer testimonials
• Contact section with phone, email, service area, social links and the estimate request form
• Footer with quick links and the Washington contractor license number, which state law requires contractors to show in their advertising

Service cards use the client’s own project photos

A masonry gallery with a lightbox for full-size viewing

How it’s built: WordPress without the bloat

The site runs on WordPress with the lightweight Twenty Twenty-Five block theme — no page builder. Instead of stacking dozens of plugin widgets, we hand-wrote the homepage as clean, semantic HTML inside a custom front-page template, so the client still gets WordPress’s admin, updates and plugin ecosystem, but visitors download only the code the page actually uses.

• A custom front-page template holds every section. Because it’s a real theme template rather than a page full of builder blocks, the layout can’t be accidentally broken from the page editor.
• One scoped design stylesheet. All of the site’s styling lives in a single CSS “kit” where every rule is scoped to the site’s own wrapper class. It can’t leak into WordPress’s own styles, and theme updates can’t overwrite it. Colors are defined once as variables, so the whole palette can be adjusted in one place.
• Tiny, dependency-free JavaScript. The mobile menu and the photo lightbox are a few lines of plain JavaScript — no jQuery, no slider library.
• Optimized images. Every photo is a compressed WebP file, and the hero image doubles as the social sharing image when the link is posted on Facebook or texted.
• Responsive by default. The grids use CSS Grid and columns that reflow from three columns on desktop down to a single column on phones.

The four-step process sets expectations before the first call

Turning Google reviews into the strongest sales tool on the page

Deschutes already had a perfect 5.0 rating on Google, so we made it a centerpiece. The reviews section shows the rating and two full customer reviews exactly as written, with links to read every review on Google and to open the business in Google Maps. We also added a “Write a Google Review” button that deep-links straight to Google’s review form for the business, so after a finished job the contractor can simply point happy customers to the website. Early on the section also had an embedded Google Map, but we removed it: the reviews do far more to persuade than a map pin, and dropping the embed made the page lighter.

Real Google reviews, plus a one-click way to leave a new one

An estimate form that actually reaches the inbox

The contact section puts the phone number, email, service area and Instagram and Facebook links beside a short estimate request form built with Contact Form 7 and styled to match the site. It asks only for what the contractor needs to call back — name, phone, email, project type, city and a short description — and confirms with a friendly “Thank you for your message. We will contact you shortly.”

A form is only useful if its messages arrive, so we set up email authentication on the domain. The DNS lives at Squarespace alongside the company’s Google Workspace email, and we added SPF, DKIM and DMARC records that authorize both the web host and Google to send mail for the domain. A test submission passed all three checks. We then pointed the form back at the owner’s inbox.

The estimate form sits right next to the phone number and email

Designed for the phone in a homeowner’s hand

Most people find a contractor on their phone, often while standing in the room they want remodeled. On small screens the navigation collapses into a hamburger menu, the hero text and buttons stack cleanly, the service cards and reviews become a single readable column, and the phone number is a tap-to-call link.

Hero, services and reviews on a phone

Local SEO from day one

• Titles and descriptions written for local search. Using The SEO Framework, the homepage title is “Deschutes General Contracting | Pierce & Thurston County” and the meta description names the core services, the 5.0 Google rating and the phone number — the details that earn a click from a search results page.
• Structured data identifies the site as a local business organization, with the logo set as both the site logo and the browser and search-result icon.
• A clean XML sitemap listing only real content, after removing WordPress’s default “Sample Page” and “Hello World” post so search engines never index placeholder pages.
• Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are verified, and the sitemap was submitted to and read successfully by both.
• Service-area wording (Pierce and Thurston Counties) is used consistently in the hero, title, tagline, footer and contact details, so search engines and visitors get the same clear signal.

Launch, hosting and security

We built the site on a temporary SiteGround address, then launched it by pointing the domain’s A record and www record at the new host. Because the domain’s DNS stayed at Squarespace, the company’s existing Google Workspace email kept working through the move with no downtime. SiteGround’s server caching keeps the page fast, and after every change we purged the cache and re-checked the live page.

The site is hardened with SiteGround’s Security Optimizer: login attempts are limited, common admin usernames like “admin” are blocked, RSS feeds and the default WordPress readme are removed, and the plugin’s other site-hardening protections are switched on.

What we built

• A single-page contractor website designed from the client’s Instagram photos and logo
• Brand system: navy and green palette, Oswald and Inter typography, WebP photography
• Custom WordPress front-page template on the Twenty Twenty-Five block theme, with a scoped CSS kit and no page builder
• Services, about, masonry gallery with lightbox, four-step process, reviews and contact sections
• Google reviews section with a direct “Write a Google Review” link
• Contact Form 7 estimate request form, plus SPF, DKIM and DMARC email authentication
• Mobile-first responsive layout with a hamburger menu and tap-to-call phone link
• Local SEO: titles, meta descriptions, structured data, sitemap, Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
• Domain launch from Squarespace DNS to SiteGround, and security hardening

Visit deschutesgc.com →