Ashley Bailey Designs · Website Strategy · Brand Identity · Digital Growth
HOME BUILDER WEBSITE REDESIGN
Home Builder Client Case Study — Web Strategy
How CAD Home Crafters & Designs discovered that skipping the strategy phase cost them in customer experience, navigation clarity, and search visibility — and what the right approach looks like.
CAD Home Crafters & Designs is a custom home builder located in Greensboro, North Carolina but you would never know that from viewing their current website. CAD Home Crafters & Designs serve their local community of Reidsville & Greensboro, NC with custom speculative home building services.
Like many small home builder businesses, CAD Home Crafters & Designs brought genuine skill, passion, and expertise to their craft — and a strong desire to establish a credible, effective online presence. Unfortunately, CAD Home Crafters & Designs has fallen short of their goal.
What followed in our client engagement was – Ashley Bailey Designs’ redesigning the CAD Home Crafters & Designs’ website.
We think we did a great job. Where we perhaps failed was communicating our marketing strategy to the client OR there were budgetary issues with fulfilling our contract.
Here we’ll present our market research findings, experience and final results in the hope that it will be fully understood for our next home builder client as we transition and resell this website in a new way.
The Core User Experience Problem
The challenge CAD Home Crafters & Designs faced isn’t unique to them — it is one of the most common and most costly mistakes small businesses make when building a website. They started building before they had a blueprint.
Specifically, CAD began creating their Wix website without first establishing a navigational hierarchy — a clear, strategic map of what pages the site would include, how those pages would be organized, how a user would move from one to the next, and what each page would need to accomplish for both the visitor and the business. The consequences played out exactly as they always do when strategy is skipped in favor of speed.
Wix templates are pre-formatted structures. When you build without a navigation plan, you begin cramming content into whatever space the template makes available — not where the content strategically belongs. The template starts working against you instead of for you.
Without a pre-planned user journey, visitors land on the site and encounter a navigation that reflects how the business added content, not how a customer thinks about their problem. Confusion leads to exits. Exits lead to lost business.
Without keyword research informing the site structure, page titles, headings, and copy — the site becomes invisible to the people actively searching for exactly what CAD offers. Good work, invisible online presence.
“Starting a website without a navigation hierarchy is like building a house without blueprints. You might end up with walls — but rooms that don’t make sense, doors that open the wrong way, and a structure that doesn’t serve the people living in it.”
— Ashley Bailey Designs, Web Strategy Framework
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Below we’ll identify some of the most glaring examples of poor user experience problems on the CAD Home Crafters & Designs current website.
Again, I ask myself, what is built for me as the viewer of this website?
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Understanding the Tool
Let’s be clear: Wix is a legitimate, capable website building platform. Millions of businesses use it successfully. The problem was never the platform — the problem was the order of operations. Strategy must come before tools.
Wix’s drag-and-drop interface is designed for flexibility, but that flexibility carries a hidden risk: it makes it deceptively easy to start building immediately, before you’ve thought through the structure of what you’re building. The result is a website that looks like a business — but navigates like an afterthought.
Pre-formatted templates are designed to showcase features, not your business strategy. Every time you try to force content into a section that wasn’t designed to hold it, the visual design suffers, the user experience degrades, and your message gets diluted.
Without pre-planning, critical pages get buried, services get lumped together when they need their own SEO pages, calls to action end up in the wrong places, and contact information becomes hard to find — the single most damaging thing a small business website can do.
3 sec
average amount of time before a confused visitor leaves
88%
of users won't return after a bad user experience
75%
of website visitors judge credibility by website design and navigation
3×
of website users are more likely to convert within 3 clicks of their initial landing page
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The Right Website Redesign Approach
A website redesign isn’t complicated, but it does require discipline — the discipline to slow down before you speed up. Before a single web page is built, before a design or template is chosen, before a single word is written, a website needs a navigational hierarchy — a strategic document that maps out every page, every section, and every user pathway towards the end goal – revenue.
Think of your website site map as the architectural blueprint of your online digital presence. Just as no reputable contractor would begin framing a house without approved drawings, no serious web strategist builds a website without a sitemap and wireframe.
✕ Without a Hierarchy Plan Navigation Bar Hero Section Wrong Section — Content Forced In Gallery (should be a separate page) Cluttered nav · Content buried · No SEO structure · Users lost | → | ✓ With Strategic Hierarchy Clean Primary Navigation (5 items max) Strategic Hero — Clear Value Prop + CTA Services Overview → Links to Dedicated Pages Social Proof / Portfolio Preview Intuitive navigation · Intentional content · SEO-ready structure · Users guided |
Sample Sitemap — CAD Home Crafters & Designs
Home
Services
↳ Custom Builds
↳ Renovations
↳ Design Consult
Portfolio
↳ Kitchens
↳ Bathrooms
↳ Outdoor
About
↳ Our Story
↳ Our Team
Reviews
↳ Testimonials
↳ Case Studies
Contact
↳ Get a Quote
↳ Service Area
Navigation hierarchy is the structure that’s provided to a website giving a potential website visitor a strategic flow to experience and navigate through your business’s website. Without a navigation hierarchy a user is left to hunt and peck their way through your content and they often leave your business’s website frustrated, having not found the information they came to find.
If users cannot find the content or information they sought to find or that led them to your website, it will lead to a higher bounce rate in your website’s Performance. You can view this website performance metric in Google Analytics. Ultimately, your rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs) will be affected and you will lose traffic over time.
How to Do It Right
01
Define Your Business's Primary User Goals
Before building anything, ask: what are the 3 things a visitor (ie, potential customer) most need to accomplish when visiting your business or brand’s website? For a home crafts and design business, those are almost always: understanding what you do, seeing proof of your end product you are selling, and having a path to purchase your products/services and providing a clear way to contact you and your business easily.
02
Map Your Business's Website Content to the Target User Journey
Once you know customer’s goals, map your website content accordingly. Services pages should answer ‘what do you do?’ and questions a customer might have about your business. Portfolio pages should answer ‘can I see your work?’ About YOUR BUSINESS NAME pages answer ‘can I trust you?’ Contact your business pages answer ‘how do I reach you for what you are selling?’
03
Design the customer's ideal navigational experience, then choose the website structure for your customer
With a finalized sitemap in hand, evaluate Wix templates based on whether they support your navigation structure — not the other way around. This one shift transforms the platform from a constraint into a tool.
04
Write Website Content for Your Ideal Customer, Then Optimize the Content for Search Engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.
Write website page content that speaks directly to your customer’s needs. Then — and only then — layer in search engine optimization (SEO) with keyword-rich headings, meta descriptions, alt text, and internal linking. Build your website strategy-first and then create content that converts. Remember that keyword-stuffed content alienates potential customers.
05
Build, Test, and Refine Based on Real Website and User Data
Launch your business/brand website, connect Google or Adobe analytics, and watch how real customers (users) move through the new website redesign. Where do customers (users) drop off? What do they click unexpectedly get unexpected results? Use that customer data to continually refine your business’s website experience. A website is never finished. It only evolves over time.
Does your current website have a clear navigational hierarchy? Ashley Bailey Designs offers website audits that identify exactly where your site structure is costing you customers.
Search Visibility & Geographic Positioning
Even a beautifully structured website will underperform if no one can find it. For a local custom home builder business like CAD Home Crafters & Designs, search visibility is the single greatest driver of new customer acquisition — and your website strategy begins with understanding how your ideal customers search, what words they use, and how to position your business geographically.
This is the discipline of keyword research — and it should happen before a single word of website copy is written. Not after.
Different services require different pages. A contractor who does kitchen remodeling, bathroom renovation, and custom deck building should not lump all three services onto a single ‘Services’ page. Each service deserves its own dedicated page — optimized for the specific search terms people use when looking for that service.
When CAD’s site structure is built with keyword research in mind, each service page becomes a targeted entry point. A homeowner searching ‘custom deck builder Augusta’ lands on a page that speaks directly to their need — not buried three scrolls down in a generic services overview.
For a business like CAD, the vast majority of clients come from a defined geographic area. Being the #1 result in your city for your specific service beats being the #47 result nationally every single time. Capturing local intent requires deliberate placement of geographic terms throughout your site’s structure, headings, page titles, and content.
| Keyword Phrase | Intent | Competition | Recommended Page | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| home renovation contractor [city] | Commercial / Local | Medium | Homepage + About | High Value |
| custom home crafters near me | Local / Transactional | Low | Homepage Hero | High Value |
| kitchen remodel [city/county] | Transactional | High | Dedicated Kitchen Page | Important |
| custom deck builder [city] | Transactional | Low-Med | Dedicated Deck Page | High Value |
| bathroom renovation contractor | Commercial | Medium | Dedicated Bathroom Page | Important |
| home design consultation [city] | Informational / Local | Low | Services + Contact | Build Over Time |
| CAD Home Crafters Designs reviews | Navigational / Trust | Very Low | Testimonials Page | Brand Priority |
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The User Experience Cost
Poor website navigation isn’t just an aesthetic problem. It is a revenue problem. Every website visitor is a potential customer. If the visitor lands on your website and can’t quickly find what they need, it leads to a customer who never calls, never emails, never converts — and in most cases, never comes back.
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The Best Website User Experience Outcome
When CAD Home Crafters & Designs approached their website rebuild with a proper navigational hierarchy, keyword research, and user journey mapping in place before any building began, the transformation was measurable — in the site’s structure, in its search performance, and in the experience it delivered to every visitor.
With the user journey mapped before the build, every page answered the question a visitor had when they arrived. CTAs appeared where decisions were made. Contact information was always one click away. The experience reflected the quality of the work CAD actually produces.
With a sitemap created before a template was chosen, every page had a defined purpose and audience. Content had a logical home. The template was evaluated on whether it served the structure — not the other way around. Building became execution, not improvisation.
With local optimized keyword research completed before a single word was written, each page title, heading, and paragraph was built to capture specific search intent. Each service became its own page — a dedicated SEO landing point with geographic terms matching how real customers actually searched.
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“The biggest mistake wasn’t using Wix. The biggest mistake was treating the website like a bulletin board instead of a strategic tool — and building it before we understood what it needed to do.”
— Web Strategy Debrief, CAD Home Crafters & Designs Engagement
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Portfolio (Samples of Completed Work) Web Page
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Thoughtful Service Offerings Web Page
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Strategic Careers Web Page
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Strategic Contact Us Page
Ready to build your website the right way — blueprint first, build second? Ashley Bailey Designs creates strategically planned, search-optimized websites for home services businesses and professional brands.
Work With Ashley Bailey Designs
Don’t build and then plan. Plan, then build. Ashley Bailey Designs partners with small businesses, home service providers, and growing brands to create websites that are strategically structured, locally optimized, and built to convert.
Website Strategy · Navigation Architecture · Local SEO · Brand Identity
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