A family painter's craft, turned into a brand, a website and a system.
A father-and-son house painter in Grosse Pointe with decades of experience and no web presence. We built the brand, the website and their client portal, then refocused the whole site on interior work when the family's priorities and their first weeks of search data pointed the same way.
What needed solving.
Bob Guiffre has painted for more than 37 years and more than 1,800 homes across Grosse Pointe and Metro Detroit. His son Bobby works alongside him on every project. They had the reputation and the work, but no website, no brand and no way to see what their marketing was doing.
The site needed to feel as careful as their work, answer the questions homeowners ask before they hire a painter, and say nothing the family hasn't confirmed. After launch, it needed to follow the work the family actually wants: interiors.
Five stages, one family business.
- 01Brand
A logo drawn from geometry: two parallel lines forming one G, father and son side by side. A navy, brass and linen palette and a brand kit ready for signs, shirts and trucks.
- 02Website
Color Studio, a swipeable paint-chip deck, local pages for the five Pointes, a guide library and a glossary, all held to release gates that block unconfirmed claims.
- 03Launch
Search Console, analytics that never send personal details, schema for search and AI assistants, and a short review link the family can text to happy customers.
- 04Interior refocus
The family told us they want interior work, not exterior. Their early Search Console queries were already leaning interior: trim, kitchens and baths, dry times and plaster. So we rebuilt the site around that.
- 05Client portal
Their traffic, searches, calls and estimate requests in one place, with a plain-English report every week, so the family can see what the site is doing without logging in to five tools.
When the client changes direction, the site follows.
Two weeks after launch, Bob and Bobby told us they didn't want to chase exterior jobs or rank for them. We didn't guess what that meant. We read their Search Console queries, and the people already finding them were asking about trim, kitchens and bathrooms, dry times and plaster.
We wrote 48 new interior guides. Every one went through a writer, an editor and a skeptical reviewer who looked for contradictions, missing safety steps and steps in the wrong order, and each round found real problems to fix before anything shipped.
Then we turned the whole site around: an interior room as the home page hero, Interior first in the menu, footer and service cards, the guide hubs regrouped, and an estimate form that remembers which guide sent the visitor. The exterior pages stayed live and indexed, because they still earn searches. They just stopped being the front door.
- 48 interior guides written and fact-checked
- Interior first in navigation, home page and services
- Printable room-prep checklist
- Estimate form that records the guide a lead came from
- Exterior pages kept indexed, not deleted
The work, in detail.
A logo drawn in geometry
Two parallel lines form one G, father and son side by side. It's built from shapes, not a font, so it goes straight to a sign shop or an embroiderer.
Interior-first guide library
108 guides in interior, color, planning, older-home and exterior hubs, written from the questions homeowners actually search. Every new interior guide was checked for accuracy and safety before it shipped.
Color Studio
Homeowners recolor an illustrated home's body, trim, shutters and door with real Sherwin-Williams colors by name and number, share the result as a link, and carry it into the estimate request. A swipeable paint-chip deck on the home page links each color straight in.
Printable room-prep checklist
What to decide, what to clear and what to expect the week before the painters arrive. Tick it off on screen or print it.
Estimates that know their source
The estimate form takes the project type and the guide the visitor was reading, so the family knows what the customer was thinking about before they call back.
Built for phones
Tap-to-call in the header, jump links in long guides and an estimate prompt partway through every article.
Analytics without personal data
Google Analytics tracks phone taps, form steps, Color Studio use and finished guides. Names, emails and phone numbers are never sent, and the build checks it.
Release gates for honesty
The build refuses to ship any figure the family hasn't confirmed, any unconfirmed claim, a guide with no links in, or a misspelled paint brand.
- Node static generator
- SVG illustrations generated from code
- Vanilla JS with no dependencies
- Netlify, with forms wired into the client portal
- Google Analytics 4 (no personal data)
- llms.txt and llms-full.txt
- HousePainter, Article and DefinedTermSet schema
- AI crawlers explicitly allowed
- RSS feed and IndexNow
Instrument Serif with Instrument Sans. Lakeshore navy, brass and linen. A quiet, editorial layout with an arched window framing the hero room.
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