Salem Tent & Awning Ran on a 2013 Website. Here Is What Replaced It.

Salem Tent & Awning has been in business since 1890 and in Salem since 1925. They sew commercial awnings, drop curtains, hunting tents and custom covers. Their website was last touched in November 2013.

Nobody there thought of it as broken. It loaded. It had the phone number. It had photos. That is how most old contractor sites survive for a decade: nothing on them is on fire, so nobody looks.

Here is what was actually on the page, and what went up in its place.

The old site had no phone version

The site was built in table layout before phones were how people looked things up. It had no viewport tag, so a phone loaded the full desktop page and shrank it until the text was unreadable. Every customer who pulled it up on a phone had to pinch and zoom to find anything.

The phone number could not be tapped

The number was printed as plain text. On a phone you could read it and not press it. Anyone who wanted to call had to memorize ten digits, close the browser and dial by hand. Some do. A lot of them go back to the search results instead.

The contact page had no form

It listed the shop hours and two email addresses. That was it. A customer at 9pm with a torn awning and a question had to open their own email, write from scratch and hope the right person read it.

Ten years of services lived on one page

Everything they make sat on a single page of photos. Commercial awnings, sail shades and repair work all shared it. When somebody searched for one of those things, there was no page that answered it.

What replaced it

The new site went up on their own domain with 28 pages.

• Eleven service pages. Commercial awnings, residential awnings, retractable, aluminum, patio covers and carports, drop curtains, custom covers, repairs and recovers, hunting tents, sail shades, exterior shade screens. Each one written on its own terms, with its own questions answered.

• Twelve town pages. Salem, Keizer, Woodburn, Silverton, Stayton, Dallas, Independence, Monmouth, Albany, Corvallis, McMinnville and Newberg. Each one written for the work that comes from that town.

• A number you can tap on every page, in the header and the footer.

• A form that reaches the sales desk. The shop decided where it lands. Someone reads it and calls back.

• A phone layout built first. Checked on a real phone before launch.

How long it took

They saw a working preview before paying anything. After the deposit, the build was finished in 13 days and live on their domain in 20. The week between was moving it onto their domain without taking their company email down with the old host. That part deserves its own post.

The shop edits it themselves. Adding a service or changing a photo does not require calling anyone.

What to take from it

If your site has been up for more than five years, it is worth ten minutes with your phone. Tap the number. Send yourself the form. Count how many of the things you sell have their own page.

The full before and after, page for page, is here: Salem Tent & Awning, before and after.