Project portfolios for building and trade websites

What this service is

A project section added to an existing site, or rebuilt inside one. It includes a listing page that can be filtered by type of work, a page for each finished job, and a template you can fill in yourself after each new build. It starts at NZD 2,800, plus GST where applicable. That covers the section and your first six projects.

If you are having a whole new site built, this work is already part of the full build, so you do not pay for it twice.

Why one page per job

A single gallery of mixed photos tells a visitor that you have done some work. A page per job tells them what the work was. On each project page, a homeowner can see the brief, the result, the materials and your part in it, which is close to what building.govt.nz suggests clients look for when comparing builders: relevant past projects and how they were run.

Separate pages also give each job its own address, title and description, so a page about a weatherboard re-clad can be found by someone looking for exactly that.

What each project page contains

The template has fixed sections, so pages stay consistent as you add more:

• The brief. What the client asked for, in a sentence or two.
• The work. What you built or changed, the main materials and anything unusual about the site.
• Your role. Whether you were the main contractor, built to someone else's design or carried out one trade on a larger job.
• The area. A town or suburb if the owners agree, never a street address.
• Photos. Ordered so the page reads from overview to detail, each with a caption and alt text.
• Related services. A link to the service page for that kind of work.

Things the template leaves out on purpose: invented budgets, timeframes you cannot confirm and quotes from clients unless the client has agreed in writing to the exact words.

Accuracy and permission

Under the Fair Trading Act, what a business says about its own work must not mislead. A portfolio is a set of claims about your work, so we treat it with the same care as a price list. If another firm designed the house, the page says so. If a photo shows a stage you did not build, it is either captioned that way or left out.

Photos of a client's home, and anything that identifies them, are also personal information. The Privacy Act principles cover why it is collected, how it is used and when it can be disclosed. In practice we ask you to get the owners' agreement before a project goes up, to leave out house numbers, number plates and people's faces unless they have agreed, and to keep a note of who agreed and when. The project caption builder includes a permission checklist for each job.

Photos that load quickly

Project photos are the heaviest files on a contractor site. On the first screen of a project page, the main photo is a likely candidate for the Largest Contentful Paint, which web.dev says should happen within 2.5 seconds for a good experience, measured at the 75th percentile of visits.

We prepare each photo at sizes suited to phones and large screens, serve modern image formats with a standard fallback, set width and height so the page does not jump while loading, and load photos further down the page only when they are needed. Google's image guidance also asks for descriptive file names and alt text, which the template prompts you for.

What is included

• a project listing page with filters by type of work
• a project page template with the sections above
• your first six projects written up with you and published
• image preparation for those projects
• a short written guide to adding a project yourself
• phone, keyboard and image checks before launch

From your job files

• photos of each job, the best ones you have, at the largest size available
• a few lines on each job, even rough notes are fine
• the owners' agreement to publish, and any limits they set
• the service each job belongs to

Not included in the portfolio work

Photography and photo retouching are not included. We will not alter photos to change the work itself. If a job has no usable photos, we suggest leaving it out until you can photograph a similar one.