This page explains why our website and blog are different and why that matters if you’re hiring a contractor.
carriganpainting.com & blog.carriganpainting.com
This page is about my journey building a digital asset as a professional painting and plastering contractor, with no formal training in website development or marketing. To learn more about my company, go here: https://www.carriganpainting.com/company-history.
Since 2023, I have added over 100,000 words explaining in detail a lot of what we do, written by me, the owner and founder of Carrigan Painting. All the images on the website and The Carrigan Archives were taken by us. No stock images are used. You’re going to hire a company and pay them thousands of dollars to work on your biggest often most expensive asset, if it were me, I would rather see pictures of the actual work, instead of stock photos.
FirstPageMedia.com based in Amherst NY, did the initial foundation of our website in 2018. A simple 11 page website that turned out to be incredibly customizable using a basic text editor. I have since upgraded to NotePad++. I have tried GUI’s to write the website like Visual Studio, but found it too clunky. In the summer of 2023 – present, I have essentially re-written the entire website to better align with my company. (with no prior experience) I added around 25 new pages of content to the main website.
Update 01-20-26: We have surpassed over 2,000 pictures of our work, most live with in the 120+ case studies I have posted. I also switched the blog over to dark mode. Easier on the eyes as some posts can get rather long. Personally I think it looks better. Easier to read, pictures seem to “pop” more. Switching the main site over to dark mode – now there is a project and a half! Its much more involved.
Update 09-30-25: I have over 10,000 hours invested into this project.
Update 06-11-2025: I am trying to figure out how to organize the vast amount of photos we are creating of the jobs we are doing. The nesting of images on the .com has opened a few doors, though I dont have much time to work on it lately.
Update 05-18-2025: I changed some menu options, and moved some things around to make navigation easier. Had in issues earlier that caused a 301 redirect to a post vs the homepage of the blog. that was fun to diagnose. Finally figured out why there were 2 articles under FAQ instead of 1 on the side panel.. that only took 3 months to find lol
You might find these:
Thats something I tried for about 4 months, it shows your google reviews on your website. A lot of service sites have it – including our competition, but It slowed the blog so much, it was like carrier pigeons were delivering the bits and bytes, so I got rid of it. Clearly I missed a couple of them.
Update 05-10-2025: Using AI, I have figured out how to get pictures on the .com to both get bigger when tapped/clicked, as well as nesting images behind a main image, so when you tap or click the image, a small portfolio pops up with X amount of photos. This is a game changer for adding photos to the website, and as such I have added around 50 photos to our home page. Almost every image is clickable. Given the size of the site, updating the pictures for this is an on going endeavor.
A learning Experience
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. Unlike the porcelain doll known as WordPress.
The majority of our photos are on the blog(800+), and our website(150+). We do not rely on social media to host the majority of our content. This allows for direct control over our content with out relying on the mine field known as social media.
Plus by using all of our own images, no issues later with potential copyrights. Naturally all images are Copyrighted by Carrigan Painting. However I am currently exploring methods to watermark our images. There are over 600 photos on the website and blog. I have added over 30 videos to our YouTube channel(Opens in new tab) as well.
I have to do this largely myself because I am a perfectionist.
Real Word Experience
All the guides and experts in SEO say to not test out new stuff on production websites. My website and The Carrigan Archives (where you are now) are considered a production website. 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 whittle that down to one. Too many plugins.
Update: 8-25-25: This is proving a bit more difficult that I originally thought since some of my galleries contain 100+ photos. This should be fun.
You may find update markers on some webpages, those pages are being worked on, and are for me, not you. Most websites are built, and maintained in a “easy to use” interface, such as WordPress. Our website is written in notepad, so updates have to be manually set.
P.S. Don’t forget to uncheck noindex.
Where to next?
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