5
Builds in the portfolio
The work · Real builds · Real numbers
Not mockups. Live businesses getting found.
Five builds, from a 71-page contractor site holding page-one rankings to a from-scratch booking engine. Every number on this page comes from Search Console, GA4, or payment logs — and where a build is too new for data, it says so. That's the standard we hold ourselves to, because it's the standard you should hold anyone to.
170+
Pages engineered to rank
5.1×
Organic growth in 6 months, flagship build
#2
Ranking, "contractor near me"
01
Live & ranking
Caliber Contracting
Premium design-build contractor · Waterloo Regioncalibercontracting.ca ↗
A design-build firm with strong word-of-mouth and weak digital capture needed to rank for high-intent renovation searches and convert research-stage homeowners. The answer: a 71-page hand-coded architecture with a city-specific cost-guide engine — now holding page-one positions on its highest-value queries and producing a steady qualified-lead pipeline.
The standout: a cost-guide content engine
Renovation buyers all search the same first question: "what does this actually cost here?" Most contractors dodge it. This build answers it head-on — a system of interlinked cost guides (kitchens, bathrooms, additions, garden suites, basements) where the first sentence delivers a real dollar range for the region, followed by four pricing tiers, city-specific sections written to the actual local housing stock, and FAQ accordions mirrored in structured data.
The hard part isn't writing one guide — it's keeping prices, tiers, timelines, visible text, and schema markup perfectly synchronized across the whole cluster while making each city section genuinely local instead of templated. The payoff: the flagship garden-suite guide holds a top-5 Google position with the site's highest engagement time.
Build facts
- 71 pages, hub-and-spoke: 11 service divisions, per-city pages, cost guides, luxury hub
- Deep structured data — LocalBusiness, Service, FAQ, Article & Breadcrumb schema, validated per deploy
- Answer-first content + llms.txt for AI-search citability
- Custom SVG icon system — eleven hand-drawn line icons, one per division
- GA4 event-level lead tracking with AI-referral channel attribution
- Static, hand-coded — no CMS, no plugins, near-instant loads
Real results — Search Console & GA4, Jan–Jul 2026
5.1×
Impressions growth in 6 months — 12.7K → ~65K per 28 days
#2
Avg. position, "contractor near me"
~8/mo
Qualified leads via site form · 77% completion
4.8★
Across 56 Google reviews, shown on-site
Average position 33 → 11 in six months · Also page-1: garden-suite cost guide (5.8, 113 clicks) · "kitchen renovation cost kitchener" (2.9) · "home addition cambridge" (4.8)
Screenshots — capture list
02
Live product
QuoteGuard
Consumer construction-tech · Pay-per-report productquoteguard.ca ↗
Homeowners sign five- and six-figure renovation quotes they can't evaluate. QuoteGuard turns that into a self-serve product: upload a contractor's quote — even full engineer-stamped plan sets — and get a risk-scored, expert-grade analysis, with a genuine free preview and a paywall that actually holds.
The standout: an analyzer with a server-verified paywall
The visitor picks a tier, drags in PDFs, and gets a scored report: risk score out of 100, severity-tagged findings (critical / warning / positive), each with a plain-language explanation, an estimated dollar impact, and the exact question to ask the contractor. Free users see a real preview; the rest sits behind a Stripe unlock.
Two hard problems got solved properly. Large-file ingestion: serverless limits silently kill big plan-set uploads, so the build uses presigned URLs — the browser sends files straight to cloud storage, and analysis runs as a background job with live status polling. A paywall that can't be walked around: locked findings are trimmed server-side and never reach the browser at all — nothing to extract from DevTools — with payment verified against Stripe's API and a replay guard so one payment can't unlock multiple reports. Every verified sale also auto-mints re-check codes and a personal referral code, emailed within seconds.
Build facts
- Three product tiers — single quote, quote-vs-plans cross-reference, 3-quote comparison
- Direct-to-cloud uploads — no practical file-size ceiling, auto-cleanup
- Server-enforced free preview — withheld findings never leave the server
- Stripe checkout with session verification, replay protection, discount-safe tier detection
- Automated rewards — re-check + referral codes minted on every verified sale
- 16-article SEO cluster + IndexNow, llms.txt, AI-crawler access
Results status: newly launched. The payment pipeline is verified end-to-end with a live transaction (checkout → server verification → report unlock → automated code delivery, confirmed in logs). Traffic and revenue data are still accruing — and per the standard above, we don't publish numbers that don't exist yet.
Screenshots — capture list (fictional sample report only — never a live customer analysis)
CAPTURE · Desktop 1440
Free-preview report — score, risk band, one critical finding + unlock gate (sample data)
Free-preview report — score, risk band, one critical finding + unlock gate (sample data)
CAPTURE · Desktop 1440
Analyzer mid-flow — tier selected, file chips attached, email filled
Analyzer mid-flow — tier selected, file chips attached, email filled
CAPTURE · Desktop 1440
Pricing tiers — including re-check + referral value lines
Pricing tiers — including re-check + referral value lines
03
Live · pre-opening
The Paris Collective
Coworking & flexible office space · Paris, Ontariothepariscollective.ca ↗
A pre-opening coworking space needed to rank for local office-space searches before its doors opened — with live suite availability that never contradicts itself across 35 pages. Within the first week of launch, its pages were indexed, ranking, and earning a 16.7% click-through on a member profile.
The standout: live availability + a member directory that earns links
Two features carry this build. First, an interactive-availability suites page: suite cards reorder themselves — available first, leased below with muted "LEASED" badges — alongside a custom-recolored architect's floor plan with per-room leased stamps composited on and kept in sync. Inventory reads at a glance and never goes stale.
Second, a member directory where every resident business gets its own profile page — full structured data, breadcrumbs, and a dofollow link to the company's own site, all rendered from the shared template. It turns the space's community into an SEO asset for its members: one profile ranked at position ~4.8 with a 16.7% CTR within the first week. Suite numbers were deliberately stripped from profiles so they can never contradict the availability page — an anti-staleness decision baked into the architecture.
Build facts
- 35 pages: services, per-location landing pages, 17-post blog, members section
- 95 validated JSON-LD blocks — CoworkingSpace, Service, FAQ, BlogPosting, Breadcrumb
- ~36.5 KB critical payload — WebP floor plan (198→78 KB), zero render-blocking scripts
- GA4 conversion events — generate_lead on form success, email-click tracking
- Deploy checklist as runnable checks — pricing consistency, schema validity, title lengths
- llms.txt + citation-crawler access — an "AI Assistant" referral channel has already appeared
Early signals — Search Console & GA4, first weeks live
16.7%
CTR on a member profile · position ~4.8, first week indexed
64%
Organic-search engagement rate — the site's strongest channel
AI
Distinct "AI Assistant" referral channel already recorded in GA4
Pre-opening site — early data, honestly small volumes. Conversion tracking newly live; lead data accruing.
Screenshots — capture list
04
Live · new domain
HavenIQ
Proptech startup · 24/7 property supervision, Waterloo Regionhaven-iq.ca ↗
The hardest launch there is: a new company in a category buyers don't yet know to search for. The strategy — build search authority around the questions its owners actually ask (vacant-home insurance, short-term-rental economics), with software-grade content discipline on a ~47-page site.
The standout: a build gate that blocks broken pages from ever shipping
Most sites rely on a human remembering the rules. This one doesn't: a custom consistency-check script runs on every build and fails deployment on any violation — banned vocabulary (a compliance requirement in this regulated space), stale pricing, duplicate H1s, overlong titles, malformed meta, missing canonicals. Editorial, SEO, and regulatory rules encoded as executable tests. It's the reason a 47-page site stayed internally contradiction-free through rapid edit cycles.
Around it: all pricing rendered from a single constants file (change a number once, it cascades everywhere), a topic-cluster content strategy where every factual claim is attributed to a primary source, and a proof-led design built around a real redacted water bill instead of stock photography — the visual equivalent of "we measure things."
Build facts
- ~47 pages on Astro: risk pages, audience pages, comparison pages, 19 long-form articles
- Automated content-integrity gate — build fails on any rule violation
- Service + areaServed schema naming Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge as city entities
- Source-verified content — omit-if-unconfirmed discipline, primary citations only
- llms.txt + IndexNow + AI-crawler access — machine-readable from day one
- Custom copper line-art icons, flow diagrams, and data visualizations
Results status: two-week-old domain. Indexing has begun (first impressions on its insurance-content cluster within days of launch), but the site is too new for meaningful traffic or lead numbers — so none are claimed. This case study is about architecture; the data chapter gets written over the coming months.
Screenshots — capture list
05
In development · launching soon
The Yurt KW
Community wellness venue · Midtown Kitchener
A donation-based gathering space — a 24-foot yurt and a century-old barn kitchen — booked entirely by DMs and email. The build replaces that with a from-scratch, approval-based booking system that no off-the-shelf scheduler could replicate.
The standout: a scheduler built because nothing off the shelf could do this
The requirements broke every mainstream booking tool: a public program schedule and private bookings living on one calendar — approved public events show full detail (host, level, what to bring, price, a link to the practitioner's own registration); approved private events show only "Reserved · Unavailable," revealing nothing. A passcode-gated host dashboard is the single place requests get approved and contact details are visible.
The conflict logic is where it gets genuinely clever: the two spaces are treated as independent resources (a yurt booking doesn't block the barn), only approved bookings count as hard conflicts so multiple people can request a popular slot, and if your time is taken, the form suggests the nearest open windows that day as one-tap picks. Recurring series (weekly, biweekly, monthly) surface each conflicting date individually with per-date reschedule-or-skip — nothing fails silently.
Build facts
- Approval-based request flow across two independent bookable spaces
- Public/private booking logic — detail-rich cards vs. "Reserved" blocks
- Recurring series with interactive per-date conflict resolution
- Host dashboard — the only view with contact details, pending count surfaced
- Four bespoke round floor-plan SVGs drawn to the real layout, plus an illustrated hero
- In-browser image compression and a storage layer isolated for clean backend migration
Results status: pre-launch. The system is built and working; the site launches shortly. It's included here because the scheduler is the single most technically distinctive thing in this portfolio — and it'll be linked the day it's live.
Screenshots — capture list (once live)
Your business could be case study 06.
Start where every one of these did: a straight, plain-English audit of where you stand and what it would take to get found.