Everyone repeats the same advice about selling websites to remodelers: keep it cheap, keep it simple, they only want a brochure. It’s half right. Simple is fine. Cheap is the part that eats your margin, because a homeowner who types “home Renovation company Corpus Christi” into a phone expects a site that loads, shows real work and puts a working phone number one thumb-tap away.
This piece takes apart five myths that cost agencies money when they build for renovation contractors: the cheap brochure, unlimited revisions, the free gallery, the do-everything retainer and the template city page. For each one we’ll say what it costs in margin or client trust, and what to write into the scope instead. If you’re the contractor reading over an agency’s shoulder, the same points tell you what to ask for.
Myth: Remodelers only want a cheap brochure site
Reality: What they want is calls, and a brochure that produces no calls is cheap only on the invoice.
Plenty of contractors say “I don’t need anything fancy,” and they mean it. They’re busy, they’ve been sold to before, and they don’t want to pay for decoration. Fair enough.
The trouble starts when the agency hears “cheap” and scopes a five-page site with a contact form. Three months later the owner says the phone isn’t ringing. You have no written brief that says what the site was supposed to do, so you’re defending a design when the argument is about results. That conversation costs trust, and it usually ends in a discount.
Here’s the exchange that fixes it. The owner says “just something simple.” You ask: simple how, fewer pages or fewer headaches? The usual answer is fewer headaches. That is the real brief, and it’s a bigger job than a brochure.
Scope outcomes instead of pages. A call button on every page. A quote form that reaches two people. A home page that loads on a phone. Separate pages for the work the company actually does, such as kitchens, bathrooms and additions. Price those outcomes, and the word “cheap” stops steering the conversation.
No-bull verdict: Sell calls and working forms, not page counts, and you’ll stop discounting work you never agreed to defend.
Myth: Unlimited revisions keep the client happy
Reality: Unlimited revisions keep the client waiting, and they keep your margin leaking.
The myth survives because it’s an easy yes on the sales call. Nobody wants to open with limits, so the promise gets made to close the deal.
Then the typical project arrives. Changes show up in a string of separate emails over several weeks, from the owner, his spouse and a cousin who “knows websites.” Each tweak is small. Together they eat the budget, and the launch slips because nobody has signed anything off.
Remodelers already understand this logic. A job isn’t finished until the homeowner approves each stage, and change orders get priced. Put the same structure into your proposal: two rounds of consolidated feedback, one named person who approves, and a priced change for anything after that. Say it before the work starts, in plain words, and it reads as professionalism rather than stinginess.
No-bull verdict: Two rounds of feedback is generous. Anything after that is a new job, so quote it like one.
Myth: A portfolio gallery is a freebie you add at the end
Reality: A good gallery is the heaviest, slowest and most labor-intensive part of a remodeler’s site, so it needs its own line in the scope.
Photos arrive straight off phones, in the hundreds, in no order, half of them the same vanity from different angles. Someone has to choose, resize, name and caption them. If nobody is paid to do that, the gallery either ships late or ships heavy.
Heavy is the expensive failure. Full-size photos make the page crawl on mobile data, the visitor leaves, and the contractor blames the website. They won’t blame the photos they sent you. They’ll blame you.
There’s a margin angle too. Every hour you spend resizing photos for free is an hour you worked at a loss, and it never shows up on an invoice, so nobody including you notices the leak.
Scope the gallery like this:
- The client picks the finished projects worth showing, grouped by kitchens, bathrooms and additions.
- You set a limit on photos per project and say so up front.
- Photo preparation is either a priced line or a task that sits on the client’s side of the table.
- You agree who adds new projects later, and whether that is part of the retainer.
No-bull verdict: A gallery is a production job. Price the photo prep or hand it back to the client in writing.
Myth: A monthly retainer should cover everything
Reality: A retainer that covers everything is one nobody can measure, and unmeasured work is the first thing a client cancels.
We’ve all seen the invoice that says “website maintenance” and nothing else. It’s the retainer that retains nothing. The client looks at it each month, sees no change on the site, and starts asking what they’re paying for. You may be doing real work, but if they can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.
Write down what the retainer includes. Software updates. Backups that you check, not just run. A monthly test of the quote form, because a form that quietly stops delivering is the most expensive thing a contractor’s site can do. A set number of small edits. Then send a short note each month listing what was done.
Be just as clear about what the retainer leaves out. A new section, a redesign and a rewrite of the service pages are projects, not maintenance. If the line between them is vague, the client will assume everything sits on the maintenance side and you’ll absorb the difference.
That note takes ten minutes, and it is the cheapest retention tool you own. A client who sees a list of work done is less likely to go shopping for a cheaper agency. A client who sees nothing is already shopping.
No-bull verdict: Define the retainer in a list, report against it monthly, and “what am I paying for?” never comes up.
Myth: City pages are padding you can template
Reality: A page for a service area works only if it says something true about the work there, and a template with the city name swapped says nothing.
The conversation goes like this. The contractor wants to show up in every nearby town, and someone suggests a page per town by Friday, same text, new name. It’s quick, it looks thorough, and it reads as padding to visitors and search engines alike.
A coastal, humid place raises different questions from a dry inland one, and a page that answers them reads as local. Keep it to general observations, though. Don’t let the agency invent projects, years in business or service areas the contractor never confirmed. The contractor supplies the facts. You supply the structure, and you charge for the writing.
Ask the owner what they can say about a service area that a competitor couldn’t. If the answer is “nothing,” the page isn’t ready, and no amount of clever formatting fixes that. If the answer is a few honest sentences about the kind of homes and the kind of weather, you have a page.
Fewer pages with real content beat a long list of near-identical ones. Treat city pages as content work with an hourly or per-page price, not as a checkbox inside the build fee.
No-bull verdict: Build pages only for areas the contractor really serves, and price the writing separately from the build.
Where we land
Every myth above is a scope problem wearing a price tag. Remodelers aren’t hard clients. They’re clients nobody wrote the terms down for. This week, open your last proposal for a contractor and add three lines: how many feedback rounds are included, who prepares the photos, and what the retainer covers.
Cheap is a price. Scope is a contract.