A framing crew, and an owner who wanted the keys
Action Framing frames new homes, garages, cottages, decks, dormers and basements across central Nova Scotia, from Shubenacadie to the Annapolis Valley. The people landing on the site are homeowners and builders deciding who to trust with the skeleton of a building, so the site leads with real jobsite photos and a quote request rather than slogans.
The twist came after the first build. Aron, the owner, wanted the site on WordPress so he could add photos and change wording himself. That is a reasonable thing to want. The usual way to get there is to rebuild the site in a page builder, which tends to make it slower and lets one wrong drag break a layout that took days to get right.
Built by hand first, then turned into a theme
The first version is a hand-written site: home, services, projects, service areas, about and contact. The projects page carries 27 jobsite photos, each served in modern formats at up to four sizes so a phone downloads a phone-sized picture. The service area page covers four regions and roughly 48 communities. Every address from the old WordPress site was redirected to its new page, so old links and bookmarks kept working.
Before handover, a check script walked the whole site: every internal link, every image and every in-page anchor, plus one heading at the top of each page with no skipped levels. It reported 359 links and 605 image files, all resolving. That script is still the first thing that runs whenever the static source changes.
For the move to WordPress, we did not rebuild anything by hand. A converter reads each finished page and swaps only the words for editable fields, leaving every other byte of the markup exactly as it was. A comparison script then renders every WordPress page and checks it against the original, and it reports zero pages differing. Visually and structurally, the WordPress site is the hand-built site.
In the admin, each run of copy shows up as a labelled field, grouped under the heading of the section it belongs to. Clearing a field brings the original wording back. Contact details live in one place, called Business details, so changing the phone number once updates all 21 places it appears. The layout itself cannot be reached from the admin, which is the point: Aron can change anything he should be able to change and nothing he should not.
Around that, we carried his existing sign-ins over in the import, put the quote form on authenticated email sending so enquiries land in the inbox instead of the spam folder, and submitted the site to Google Search Console. It is the kind of build we describe on our websites for contractors page.
What changed for the owner
The practical change is control. Aron can add jobsite photos and update his copy himself, without waiting on anyone, and without the risk of breaking a page. The desktop scores in the strip above, measured with Lighthouse on 16 September 2026, are the same kind of numbers the hand-built version was designed to hit: 99 for performance, 100 for accessibility, 100 for SEO.
What we cannot show you yet is the business side: how many quote requests arrive each month, or how the site is doing in Search Console since we submitted it. Those numbers exist, and when the owner is happy for us to share them they will go here, with their dates.
What we would do differently
- Ask how the owner wants to edit before the first line of code. Building static first and converting later worked, and the conversion is exact, but it was a second piece of work that one question at the start would have folded into the first.
- Keep plugins on a short leash. WordPress makes it easy to add scripts, and some of the ones that arrived with plugins, Google's Site Kit among them, cost the site speed on phones. The phone run is well below desktop, so it is not in the strip. Trimming those scripts and the heaviest photos is the next job.
- Set up counting at launch. Form submissions and search data should be in a monthly report from the first week, so a case study like this one can show results instead of promising them.
See it live
The site is at actionframing.ca. If you quote jobs for a living and want the follow-up side handled too, an instant quote range, automatic text-back to new enquiries and every lead in one dashboard, that is what the Lead Machine is for.
Sources: Lighthouse runs dated 2026-09-16; build details from the project's own conversion notes.