Deck building and Deck Academy · Seattle and the Eastside
Craft Boys build and restore decks around Seattle and the Eastside, and they also teach the trade: Deck Academy trains people and companies to run deck work themselves. The old site said none of that. It was a general construction template with a project grid made of social embeds and a contact block dated 2023, and the academy appeared on none of the pages we have on file. The new site gives Deck Academy a page of its own at /deck-academy/, names the deck trade at the top for homeowners, and carries an AI assistant that answers questions about the company at any hour.
At a glance
The starting point
The site we replaced was a red‑and-white template headlined "Construction And Renovation Services In Seattle." A homeowner on the Eastside looking for someone to rebuild a rotted deck landed on a page about renovation in general, from a company whose specialty is decks. And in the seven pages of the old build we have on file, the training side of the company appears nowhere: Deck Academy, a second business with a second audience, had no page to send anyone to. The proof was weaker than the positioning too. The Our Projects grid was a wall of Instagram embeds that never played in place, with one tile sitting there as a cartoon clip placeholder. Client Reviews was a slider of red cards. The contact block was still dated 2023, with a Redmond address doing all the local work for a business that serves Seattle and the Eastside.
Both frames are the home page at the same width, cropped from the top. Neither image is retouched.
What we built
Craft Boys teach the trade as well as working in it. Deck Academy sells training to people and companies who want to run deck work themselves, supported from first steps through to full accompaniment, and it now has a destination of its own at /deck-academy/ where the old build had none. It draws on the same components as the rest of the site, so a homeowner comparing deck builders and someone weighing up the training each land on a page written for them.
The site is hand-built: plain PHP for the templates, HTML and CSS written by hand, JavaScript where it earns its place. There is no third-party CMS underneath and no plugin stack generating markup we did not write, so every page, every heading and every piece of on‑page search work sits exactly where we put it. Updates to this site are code changes to files we own.
The site carries an AI chat assistant that answers visitor questions about Craft Boys — who they are, what they build, how to get in touch. It handles the same handful of questions a homeowner would otherwise ask by phone, at whatever hour they happen to be reading. Anything that needs a judgment call about a specific deck still ends in a conversation with the crew.
The Our Projects grid on the old site was a wall of Instagram embeds that never played in place, with one tile sitting there as a cartoon clip placeholder. The new pages carry imagery for each of the five services, deck building, repair, restoration, pergolas and railings, on the page itself, so the proof is visible to a visitor and to anything reading the page.
Design and devices
The old site pointed at a social feed for proof and named the wrong trade at the top of the page. The new one does the opposite work: the headline and the service sections say deck building, repair, restoration, pergolas and railings, and each of those services carries its own imagery on the page rather than an embed that never loads. The before and after pair on this page is the home page itself, which is where the difference in positioning is clearest. The geography is written out as Seattle and the Eastside, so a reader in Redmond or Bellevue sees their own area named. Deck Academy is given a destination of its own rather than a paragraph inside a homeowner's page. And the pages are server-rendered, which keeps them simple to read for a visitor, a crawler and an answer engine alike.
What came of it
The clearest thing this build does is give the second business a door. Deck Academy sits at /deck-academy/, so someone who wants to learn the trade is no longer reading a page written for a homeowner with a rotted deck, and the old build had nowhere at all to send them. Around it sits a site that names decks where the old one said "Construction And Renovation Services," service imagery where the old grid had embeds that never played, an assistant that answers questions about the company at any hour, and search work aimed at crawlers and answer engines alike. Craft Boys report that inquiries started coming through the site in its first month. The measurement layer — analytics, call tracking, per-source attribution — is the next piece of work, and it is what would let this page say more than it says now.
Audiences with a destination of their ownHomeowners around Seattle and the Eastside, and Deck Academy at /deck-academy/.
Deck services given their own imageryDeck building, repair, restoration, pergolas and railings.
First inquiries arrived through the new siteClient-reported.
The build was optimized for AI answer engines as well as for search crawlers. Pages are server-rendered, so nothing a language model needs sits behind client-side rendering; the copy states plainly what Craft Boys build, where they work, and that a training arm exists at /deck-academy/; and the business is described in machine-readable markup. What no one can promise is a citation in any particular assistant's answer, and we do not sell one.
How we ran it
Every project runs on a written plan. This is how this one ran.
We went through the previous build page by page and listed what it was costing them: general construction positioning on a deck company, project proof stuck inside social embeds that never played, contact details two years stale, one address standing in for a whole service area. In the same pass we separated the two readers, homeowners and Deck Academy trainees, because they need different pages and different proof.
The deck services get their own names and their own sections instead of living under a general renovation headline. The service area becomes Seattle and the Eastside, written out on the page rather than implied by one office address. This map is what the templates, the on‑page search work and the assistant all draw from later.
Templates, pages and front‑end behavior are ours to edit directly, with no CMS underneath and no plugin layer in between. Every page is assembled from the same components, so the academy page and the service pages behave the same way.
Titles, headings and copy target how people search for this trade in this area. On top of that goes the answer-engine work: clean server-rendered HTML and machine-readable markup, so a crawler and a language model get the same clear version of what the business does, where it works and what it is licensed for.
The training arm gets a destination of its own, aimed at people and companies who want to run deck work themselves with support from the start onward. It shares the codebase and the components, so it costs a page of work instead of a second project.
The site went live and, by the client's account, inquiries started arriving in its first month. Analytics, call tracking and per-source attribution are the first thing we would ask for on a second round, since without them nobody can say which part of this work is doing the pulling.
Straight answers
Yours is probably close to one of these. If not, ask it directly.
Ask about your projectSame team, same method
Tell us what you sell and where you sell it. You get a plan like the one above, with the first step priced out and dated before anything starts.
