A design-build contractor founded in 1968, a website that had not kept pace, and a ground-up rebuild: new strategy, new design, custom drone footage, 53 project pages and a clear path from first visit to first conversation.
Caladesi Construction & Development is a family-owned design-build general contractor in Largo, Florida. Founded in 1968, the company has delivered more than 500 projects across Pinellas, Hillsborough and Pasco counties: municipal buildings, churches, manufacturing and warehouse space, airport hangars, fire stations and the Pier 60 bait house on Clearwater Beach. They are an authorized Butler Builder® and handle planning, design, management and construction under one roof.
The work was first rate. The website was not telling that story.
The Challenge
The old caladesi.biz had been online for well over a decade. A dark, boxed-in layout, a long welcome essay, a list of services and a phone number. The project portfolio, the single most persuasive thing the company owns, lived in a page of 91 PDF links that visitors had to download one at a time. There was no way to filter by building type or county, no page a search engine could rank for a specific project, and no clear next step for a prospect who was ready to talk.
Ownership set the goal plainly: a visitor should be able to tell quickly what Caladesi does and whether the company fits their project, with commercial and industrial clients as the primary audience. And the new site had to run on a back end their marketing coordinator could update without a developer.
Phase One: Strategy and Direction
We started with an on-site session at the Caladesi office and a written rebuild strategy: who the site is for, what it must say, and how it should be organized. From that came the sitemap (Our Story, Our Process, Projects, Community, Contact, with a dedicated Start Your Project flow as the primary call to action) and a messaging framework built around the company’s Full Circle approach: planning, design, management and construction handled by one team.
The design direction came out of Figma. We called it Heritage Modern: the calm confidence of a drafting room. A paper-toned ground, ink typography, one restrained red accent, gold reserved for drafting marks, blueprint-slate section bands, and low-opacity drafting textures (grids, rings, a ghost compass) behind every section. Squared corners throughout, because a 1968 builder does not need rounded buttons. Ten page frames were approved before a line of code was written.
Phase Two: Media Day
Stock photography was never on the table for a company with this much real work to show. We shot it ourselves with a drone: aerials of finished Caladesi projects around Pinellas County, from recreation centers and churches to the Pier 60 bait house, plus an active jobsite. The footage was cut into a reel and a set of short looping b-roll clips for the hero sections.
Phase Three: The Build
We built a custom WordPress block theme directly from the approved Figma frames. Design tokens (colors, type scale, spacing) live in one place, every section is a labeled block with its own fields, and the editing experience is the standard WordPress editor the client already knew. Self-hosted fonts, no third-party font calls, and every background texture drawn in code.
- A real projects system. Each of the old PDFs became a proper project page with photos, scope, location and building type. The archive carries a county map, featured projects first, then a filterable grid by project type, county and era. 53 project pages at launch, with a template ready for every job that finishes from here on.
- Downloadable job sheets. The old PDF library existed because clients and partners like a one-page summary. Every project page now generates its own branded job sheet PDF on demand, so that habit is preserved without maintaining a separate library.
- Client voices. Every testimonial from the old site was carried over and joined by recent Google reviews, surfaced in a carousel on the homepage.
- Two conversion paths. Start Your Project for prospects ready to begin, and a conventional Contact page, both protected by invisible Cloudflare Turnstile so real inquiries reach the owner and spam does not. A 15-minute project introduction call can be booked right from the bottom of the homepage.
- FAQ written as search intent. Thirty-plus questions phrased the way prospects actually search: who builds municipal projects in Pinellas County, what a Butler Builder is, how design-build pricing works.
- Careers, Community and News. Open roles with a built-in application form, the company’s community work, and a news feed the client runs themselves.
Before and After
Launch
Go-live was handled as a full migration. We built a complete redirect map from the old site, 172 rules covering every page, post, category archive and all 91 PDFs, so nothing a search engine or a bookmark had ever pointed at returns a dead end. The site launched with SEO titles and descriptions on every page, a structured sitemap, server-side caching and image optimization, and private analytics for the owners.
The Result
Caladesi now has a site that looks like the company: established, exact, and easy to work with. Prospects can see the building type they care about in a few clicks, read how the process works, watch the work from the air, and start a conversation without hunting for it. The marketing team can add a finished project, post news or open a role from the standard WordPress editor, and the design holds no matter who is editing.
The site runs on our managed hosting: monitored, backed up and kept current, with development time included each month for the next round of improvements.
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