Twenty years of premium decks, on a site that finally looks like the work

1. Problem

   The menu was the sitemap

   Sixty-two links hung off the main navigation: fifteen services, thirteen city pages, seven About sub-pages, six process pages, five material brands. Somebody who wanted a composite deck in Oakville had to read a directory before they could read a sentence.

   Solution

   One menu a person can hold in their head — services, commercial, process, portfolio, about, calculator, contact — with cities and material brands living inside the pages that need them.

2. Problem

   The homepage sold a deck builder, not this one

   “Your custom deck builder”, one green button, and a photograph of a weathered pressure-treated deck with a chain-link fence behind it. Nothing said twenty years, nothing said Ipe, nothing said the warehouse full of stock. Below it came around nine hundred words written for a search engine rather than a homeowner — “we possess unique technologies”, “Delta Decks possesses the best deck constructor”.

   Solution

   A first screen that names the company, its rating, and the four principles it runs on — then goes straight into the services and the real projects.

3. Problem

   A twenty-year portfolio, filed under first names

   Ninety-six projects, titled TOM'S DECK, AARON'S DECK, HOWARD'S DECK, VAUGHAN PROJECT. Behind each one: a slideshow and two sentences — “Deck over walkout basement. Ipe decking with many custom features.” Nothing a customer could search for, compare, or send to the person they share the backyard with.

   Solution

   Projects rebuilt as case pages: the material and the brand, the town, how long it took, the problems the crew actually solved, and what the finished space does.

4. Problem

   Every page ended at the same six-field form

   Name, email, phone, project address, details, Submit — identical at the bottom of a rooftop terrace enquiry and a front-porch one, with nothing to tell the office which was which. And no way at all for a homeowner to find out whether Delta Decks was in their range before handing over a phone number.

   Solution

   A calculator that turns somebody's own measurements into an itemised figure in four steps, and a quote request that arrives with that estimate already attached to it.

5. Problem

   The group did not point at itself

   Delta Decks builds in Ottawa and the Kawarthas under their own names and supplies materials through a separate shop. None of that was linked from anywhere a customer or a search engine would look, and the Instagram account where the work actually gets posted was three icons in the footer.

   Solution

   Sister sites linked from the service-area section, manufacturers linked from the projects that used them, and the Instagram feed running on the pages where somebody is deciding.

None of this was a bad site for its time. It was a competent build of what a contractor's website was supposed to be a decade ago, and it did its job for years while the company got on with building decks. What changed is what customers now do before they call: they look for proof, a price range and a reason to trust you, and they decide in about ten seconds.

1. Addresses

   A move that did not cost the rankings

   Every section of the old site changed address — /about became /about-delta-decks, /contacts became /contact-us, ninety-six project URLs collapsed into a new structure. All of it mapped before launch, so twenty years of accumulated links and search history landed on the right page instead of a 404.

2. Linking

   The group finally points at itself

   Ottawa Deck Builders and Kawartha Deck Builders are linked from the service-area section, the materials shop from the products it supplies, and each project links out to the manufacturer page for the boards and railings it actually used — which is also what tells a search engine what the project is about.

3. Social

   Instagram on the site, not a second site

   The Instagram feed runs on the homepage, the about page and the contact page, so the newest work is on the site the day it is posted. The profiles are linked properly rather than sitting as three unlabelled icons in a footer.

4. Enquiries

   Nothing waits in an inbox

   Forms are protected against bots, routed by what the customer is asking about, and delivered to the CRM and to Telegram together — so a rooftop enquiry on a Saturday is seen on a Saturday.

1. Version 1

   An outside designer, and me holding the brief

   I brought in a freelance designer for the first version and ran the project around them — scope, structure, rounds of review, and the decisions about what the site had to do before anyone opened a design tool.

2. Version 2

   Rivo.Agency built it on Bricks

   The development team at Rivo.Agency did the coding and moved the project onto WordPress with Bricks Builder. I coordinated that work — specifying behaviour, reviewing builds, and keeping the design intent intact through implementation.

3. Since launch

   The improvements are mine

   From the summer 2025 launch onwards the changes are my own work: UX and UI reworks, the SEO structure, the project page template, the internal linking, the media, and the calculator built from scratch this year.

4. Still going

   Finished in the summer of 2026, and continuing

   The rebuild started at the end of 2024 and the version live today was signed off this summer. It is not a project that ended — new builds are photographed, written up and published as they finish.

Draft — written up from Elgi's feedback and awaiting his approved wording.