Katz Web Design has completed a website for Mountain High Roofing, Inc., a Denver roofing company.
The Mountain High Roofing website is built on WordPress. It’s what I would consider to be a medium level of customization; the website is a custom website design with a few plugin customization options. It allows Mountain High to easily update their own content, and add articles to their blog. The code is well-structured for really good SEO results.
The project went quite smoothly; the copywriting was done by The Write Touch, and the previous website was easy to redirect: it had only been 4 pages.
Incorporating ServiceMagic.com ratings
One of the interesting things developing this site was trying to incorporate the company’s ServiceMagic.com rating. ServiceMagic is the 800 pound gorilla on the web for the service industry. My customers often love the website because it sends them lots of leads, but it charges a lot. One client told me that ServiceMagic charges $55.00 for every lead.
I hoped, since they charge so much, that the website would at least offer a quality API so that I could pull Mountain High’s ratings from their website using PHP or Javascript. I was hoping for a ServiceMagic API with a JSON feed of testimonials and ratings. Instead, there was nothing. I called their support team, and they confirmed no options for incorporating.
A sneaky CSS trick to get around ServiceMagic
Service Magic doesn’t allow access to their pages using techniques such as cURL, which would be easily manipulated and added to the website. I tried all sorts of better options before realizing I’d have to go old-school!
Since there was no way to create an RSS feed using some RSS feed creation services, I had to resort to CSS trickery. I used an old-school iFrame that pulled in their rating summary pop-up, and then used css to add a header to the sidebar iFrame using absolute positioning. I added an invisible link that covers the entire iFrame and goes to the company’s full reviews. Voila, an external iFrame that is styled just like the company’s website. The end result I think looks great and serves its purpose.
6 replies on “Denver Roofing Company – Website Launched!”
Really nice site design…
Nice job Zack! Your Service Magic trick is genius. I probably would have tried ‘scraping’ their site for the information, but that code would eventually break and need to be maintained.
Another WP roofing site is Roof Life of Oregon. The owner there (judging by his writing style) is a natural born blogger, and has a real knack for it.
I recently did a complete rework of a roofing site, but chose to go the Zend Framework route. Since I do all of the content additions, did not have a need for a real backend on the site. Allowed me to do some wicked gallery integration into the site, and the code is lean and mean (BTW, it is using the Copyblogger WP theme CSS and layout as well).
If you need any help in with the copywriting, drop me a line. I am well versed in the roofing trade and can ‘pencil-whip’ something up fairly quick.
Ronnie T. Dodger
Just checked the Service Magic link on that roofing site … it is broken and no longer available. May want to look into that.
Ronnie
Ronnie, it would seem they have stopped using ServiceMagic! Thanks for finding that!
I wasn’t allowed to scrape the ServiceMagic site because of the way they set up their robots.txt file:
Disallow: /rfs/serviceprofessional/xmprofile/– this has all the reviews et cetera. Oh well 🙂Scraping is not a robot activity, is it? LOL
BTW, I am subscribed to this post and did not receive notification when you responded above.
Hi,thanks for sharing the information regarding to Denver roofing website.Really a nice website content is taken here.I’m very impressed by it.