Everything a prime needs to shortlist you, before the contact form.
Central Plains Communications is a cable and fiber contractor working across Nebraska. Empyria rebuilt its website around the two decisions that actually get made on it: whether a prime or a rural co-op shortlists the company for a bid, and whether an experienced splicer applies. Proof and service territory now sit above the contact form.
Two rooms you are not in
Contracting in this sector is won in two rooms you are not in. In the first, someone at a prime or a rural co-op is deciding whether to put your name on a shortlist, and they are doing it from a browser tab days before anyone picks up a phone. In the second, a splicer with ten years of experience is deciding whether your company looks like a place that treats crews well.
Both people arrive at the same website. On most contractor sites, both leave without an answer. Safety record, certifications, bonding capacity and completed footage sit behind a Contact page, if they are on the site at all. Careers is one line of text with a generic inbox behind it.
And there is a third constraint that changes how the whole thing has to be built: a foreman reading the site on one bar of signal in a truck cab is a real share of the traffic, not an edge case to be handled later.
Five decisions, made once
Each one is a thing a generic contractor template does the other way round.
Proof goes above the form, not behind it.
The page a buyer lands on states certifications, bonding capacity, safety record and footage completed, in plain figures, before it asks for anything. A buyer who is not ready to enquire is not a lost buyer. They are one who has not been given a reason yet.
Careers is treated as a product page
In this sector the constraint is not work, it is crews. So the hiring page gets what a product page gets: what the job actually is, where it is, what the equipment is like, who you would report to, and an application that can be finished on a phone at the end of a shift.
Service territory is answered in one screen
A map with the county list in text beside it. Not a phone number and an invitation to ask, which is how most sites in this field answer the first question every buyer has.
Speed is a design constraint, not a launch checklist item
No purchased theme, no builder bloat shipped to the browser, no framework loaded to draw a heading. The truck-cab version is the same site as the office version, not a stripped one.
Built for the next funding wave, not the last one
BEAD, RUS and the state broadband offices move on a schedule you can read in advance. The structure assumes program pages get added, so standing up a page for the next round is an afternoon rather than a rebuild.
A foreman on one bar of signal is a real share of your traffic. A site that takes six seconds to load is a site that was never seen.
The constraint that set the budget
The build
10 pages on WordPress and Bricks, on a custom child theme that holds the entire design system in one stylesheet. No purchased theme, and no license that has to keep being renewed for the site to keep working.
- A capability section carrying certifications, bonding capacity and safety record as readable facts rather than a downloadable PDF.
- A service-territory map with the county list in text beside it, so it is legible to a search engine and to a person on a slow connection.
- A careers system: one page per open role, an application that works on a phone, and a template so a new posting takes minutes rather than a call to me.
- A projects section written from interviews with the crews who did the work, because a foreman explains a job better than a marketer will.
- Schema for the organization, the service area and each open role, so postings are eligible to appear in job search results.
What happened, without a percentage
This is the point where a case study usually produces a number. I am not going to, and the reason is the same reason this portfolio is worth reading: I own this company. A statistic I generate about my own business is not evidence, it is marketing with a decimal point in it.
What I can tell you is what changed, and what it has been like to live with.
The bid conversation starts further along. The proof is on the site, so a first call is about scope rather than about whether the company is real.
Applications arrive with the right people attached.. The careers page describes the job honestly enough to put off the people it should put off, which is most of what a hiring page is for.
Nothing has broken since launch. No theme update that took the site down, no plugin that had to be swapped because a vendor changed its pricing.
And when something does need doing, the person who designed it does it. There is no ticket queue, because there is nobody to queue behind. That is the part that carries over to a client who is not me.
Your field has its own version of this.
Every sector has three or four things its websites get wrong that cost real money. Finding them is the first half of the job. Tell me what you are building and you will hear back within one business day.