carriganpainting.com

This page is about my journey (the owner of Carrigan Painting) in website development as a professional painting and plastering contractor. To learn more about my company, go here: https://www.carriganpainting.com/company-history.

FirstPageMedia.com based in Amherst NY, did the initial layout of our website in 2018. A basic website that is incredibly customizable using a basic text editor. In the summer of 2023 – present, I have essentially re-written the entire website to better align with my company. (with no prior experience) However I have pretty much maxed out what I am capable of on the current platform and am working on a major upgrade to the .com. But it is a monumental undertaking for someone with almost no experience!

I may hire out the initial setup of the new website and then tinker with it like I did this time. This gives me a working platform to break vs trying to get the platform to work. Oh yes this has been a huge learning experience for me. I can say I have never broken the website to the point where it required more than a 5 minute fix. The platform I am on, is very resilient to tinkering.

Since 2023, I have added over 60,000 words explaining in detail a lot of what we do, written by me, the owner of Carrigan Painting. All the images on the website and the blog were taken by me or a family member. No stock images were used. Your going to give a company thousands of dollars to work on your biggest often most expensive asset, if it were me, I would rather see pictures of the work, instead of stock photos.

Plus by using all of our own images, no issues later with potential copyrights. All images are Copyrighted by Carrigan Painting. However I am currently exploring methods to watermark our images. There are over 400 photos on the website and blog. I have added about 3 dozen videos to our YouTube channel as well. I think I may be approaching the largest collection of photos of previous work, of any one contractor in the United States.

The images on the website, are not clickable because I don’t know how to make them clickable – so they get bigger. I continue to try. But all the images on the blog should be clickable. I have to do it largely myself because I am a perfectionist.

You may find update markers on some webpages, those pages are being worked on, and are for me, not you.

Real Word Experience

All the guides and experts in SEO say to not test out new stuff on production websites. My website and blog are considered production websites. The problem I have is I don’t have multiple websites to try out new stuff on. Like the portfolios use 4 different gallery formats… I am trying them out to see which one will work best for my application. I am about to widdle that down to one. Too many plugins.

Updated: 1/28/25