A Contractor Site Built From an Instagram Feed

The site

A renovation contractor with two crews, working on older houses across Victoria and the Saanich Peninsula: kitchens, main-floor remodels, the occasional addition. The site is five pages, tidy and plain.

The page called Our Work is an embedded Instagram feed: the latest twenty posts from the owner's account, in a grid of squares. The home page shows the newest eight under the heading Recent Projects.

Today the grid holds a finished kitchen, a black Labrador on a tailgate, a burger, two photographs from a hockey tournament, a bathroom with the tile half laid, a sunset and a disposal bin full of old cabinets.

The kitchen is excellent. It is one square in twenty.

The inference a visitor makes

A homeowner planning a renovation opens a gallery for one reason: to see whether this contractor's finished work looks like what they want, at the standard they expect.

What they find is somebody's life. A pleasant one, with a handful of projects scattered through it, several of them unfinished.

The conclusions come quickly. The business is small and informal, perhaps a side line, with little finished work, or the owner would show it. Nobody has thought about what a client needs to see.

None of that may be true. The contractor may have a long list of finished kitchens, but the visitor cannot know, and is deciding whom to let into their house for two months.

What the feed shows instead

• Whatever was posted last, rather than what is best.
• Personal posts between the project photographs.
• Work in progress with no finished version beside it.
• Square crops that cut a room in half.
• Captions made of hashtags, saying nothing about the job.
• Links that take the visitor off to Instagram.

The first sets up all the others. A feed is chronological by design, so the gallery changes every time the owner posts, and nobody ever decides what a prospective client sees.

A week off fills the gallery

When the crews take a holiday, the owner posts holiday photographs, and the gallery on the business website becomes a holiday album.

The same happens during a long job. Six weeks on one big job fills the grid with the same half-built room, all demolition and framing.

A visitor arriving that week judges the business on what the account happened to be doing, not on what the business has done.

Personal posts on a business page

On Instagram, among followers who know the owner, the dog and the hockey tournament are part of the appeal. People follow a person.

On the website they arrive without that context, in front of strangers judging workmanship. The burger is not offensive; it is simply not evidence of anything a client needs.

And it all arrives without anybody choosing it. Photographs of the owner's children at the rink appeared on the company's website the day they were posted, because the feed shows everything.

Squares and hashtags

Feed plugins show square thumbnails, and a square crop of a wide kitchen loses both ends: the window on one side, the pantry on the other. The photograph that would persuade is cut to fit the grid.

Before and after shots posted side by side in one image become two halves of a small square.

The captions, where shown, are strings of hashtags. Nothing says what was done, where, how long it took or what problem it solved, which is what a homeowner reads a project for.

Search engines get no more from it. The page has no text of its own, the images load from Instagram's servers, and nothing on it says kitchen renovation in Victoria.

A gallery that can go blank

The feed also depends on a connection to the Instagram account, and connections lapse.

Instagram announced this year that it is phasing out the older way outside sites read its posts, and feed plugins have been changing how they connect.

When the connection fails, the gallery shows an error or nothing at all until somebody looks.

A worked example

The owner saw the problem through a client's eyes during a kitchen consultation. The homeowner mentioned, kindly, that she had nearly not called, because the website seemed to be mostly about a dog.

The contractor kept the Instagram account exactly as it was, and took it off the website apart from one link in the footer.

In its place went a gallery of nine finished projects, chosen by the owner and his lead carpenter. Each has five to eight photographs, before, during and finished, stored on the site itself.

Each project has a short paragraph: the kind of house, the neighbourhood, what was done, how long it took, and one problem solved along the way, such as a sagging floor found under the old kitchen.

The projects are grouped by kind of work, so a visitor interested in kitchens sees kitchens. The home page shows three of them, chosen deliberately, with a link to the rest.

A finished job now goes into the gallery within a month of completion, added by whoever took the photographs.

Photographs worth adding

A phone will do for the photographs, used with care.

Shoot the finished room in daylight, with the lights on, from the doorway and from the corners. Take the before photographs from the same positions before demolition starts, so the two can be compared.

Clear the counters and put the tools away. Photograph a client's home with their permission, and keep house numbers, family photographs and anything else that identifies them out of the frame.

The counter-case within the site

An Instagram feed is not always wrong on a business site.

An account that posts nothing but finished work can show a small strip of recent posts lower on the home page, as a sign the business is busy. That supplements a gallery; it never replaces one.

Personality is not the problem either. A short paragraph about the owner and a photograph of the crew on the About page do the human part better than a burger in the portfolio.

The gallery itself should be chosen, finished, described and hosted on the site.

What to change

1. Look at the gallery as a stranger would.
2. Choose eight to twelve finished projects.
3. Collect before and after photographs for each.
4. Write a short paragraph about every project.
5. Store the photographs on your own site.
6. Link to Instagram rather than embedding it.
7. Add each finished job within a month.

Step four is what turns photographs into evidence. A picture shows that a kitchen looks good; a paragraph explaining what was wrong with the house, and how it was put right, shows how the contractor works.

Another home page that leads with the wrong thing is taken apart in a law office site with a wall of logos.

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