Slowing down a renovation site on purpose
Homeowners spending six figures do not decide in ninety seconds. We built a site that supports a long, considered decision.
- Client
- Elbow Park Renovations
- Sector
- Residential renovation
- Service
- Website
Elbow Park Renovations
01 · Overview
Elbow Park handles whole-home renovations in Calgary's inner-city communities, with projects that routinely run past $400,000 and take eight months. Their previous site was built on the same logic as a plumbing website: get the phone to ring as fast as possible.
That is the wrong shape for the decision. Their clients take between four and fourteen months to choose a renovator, and they involve a partner, sometimes an architect, and almost always a spreadsheet.
02 · Goals
- 01Support a decision measured in months rather than minutes
- 02Show the process honestly, including cost and disruption
- 03Give one partner something to send to the other partner
- 04Attract people planning genuine whole-home work, not small repairs
03 · What we did
- 01
Documented projects properly
Each case study covers the brief, the constraints, the actual budget band, the timeline and what changed along the way. Photography is paired with plans so the scope is legible.
- 02
Published the process and the money conversation
A dedicated process section covers what each stage costs, how long the family will be out of the house and what typically goes wrong. Competitors do not publish this.
- 03
Built for sharing, not converting
The primary action on a case study is not a contact form. It is a downloadable project summary, because the person reading it needs to show it to someone else before anything happens.
- 04
Filtered hard at the top
The site is explicit about minimum project scope. Enquiry volume dropped and the proportion of enquiries worth a site visit went up sharply.
04 · Deliverables
- Custom website with nine fully documented project case studies
- Process and investment section covering cost, timeline and disruption
- Downloadable project summaries for sharing with partners and architects
- Photography art direction across three completed renovations
- Consultation request form with scope and timeline qualification
- Content structure for the team to add future projects
05 · Results
This is the project we point to when a client asks whether fewer leads can be a good outcome. Elbow Park hears from fewer people and books nearly twice as many site visits, because the ones who make contact have already read the difficult parts and stayed.
- Average session
- 6:12
- Median engaged time on the site, up from 47 seconds.
- Return visitors
- 3.8x
- People coming back across multiple sessions before enquiring.
- Enquiry volume
- -38%
- Deliberate. The filtering at the top of the site is working.
- Site visits booked
- +91%
- Qualified in-person consultations, despite fewer total enquiries.
“They talked us into publishing our real numbers and our real timelines. I thought it would scare people off. It scared off exactly the right people.”
Principal, Elbow Park Renovations
We will walk you through this project in full, including the parts that did not work first time.
Book a session and we will take you through the Elbow Park Renovations build properly: the decisions, the trade-offs and what we would do differently. Then we will tell you honestly whether the same approach fits your business.
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Every one of these began with one honest conversation.
Tell us what is happening in your business right now. We will tell you whether we can help, what it would cost and how long it would take, in writing, before you commit to anything.
- Emailhello@harwoodmedia.ca
- Phone(403) 555-0182
- Response timeEvery enquiry answered by the next business day.
