A fifth-generation family HVAC company, in business since 1876 and in the Bay Area since 1901. Their new website had to carry that history and still get a broken furnace booked fast, on any screen.
The company was founded in 1876 and has been in the Bay Area since 1901. Very few service businesses anywhere can say that. Almost nobody visits an HVAC website to read about it.
People land on an HVAC site because something is broken, or about to be. They want a phone number, a service list and a reason to trust the company that shows up. Meanwhile the family history, the thing that actually sets the company apart in a crowded Bay Area market, is exactly what a busy customer skips.
You build a museum. Beautiful, slow, and the customer with no heat calls someone else.
You build every other HVAC site. Fast, forgettable, and 150 years of trust goes unused.
The brief: lead with service, earn trust with history.
I also led strategy, setting the information architecture and page priorities before any design started. Every decision went back to the same test: does this help someone book service, or help them trust the company enough to book?
Call Today, Schedule Service and the Comfort Club sit in the header on every page. Above the fold on the homepage, the core services come before any company story: heat pumps, mini splits, indoor air quality, water heater heat pumps and commercial design build.
The history shows up in small, confident doses: a Since 1876 seal, archival San Francisco photography behind section headers, a line about five generations. The full story lives on the About page for the people who want it.
The company has real credentials: Diamond Certified, Carrier Factory Authorized Dealer, BBB A+, Angi Super Service, plus ACCA, NATE, BPI and San Francisco Chamber of Commerce affiliations. A dedicated Awards & Affiliations page collects them, and the strongest marks repeat sitewide.
The Comfort Club maintenance plan and equipment financing drive repeat business and bigger installs. Both got full homepage sections with plain-language benefits and a single clear action, instead of a link buried in a menu.
A family business that has run for five generations is careful about how it is presented. My job was to keep the project moving while making sure the family recognized themselves in every page.
I owned the project from kickoff to launch: scope, schedule, reviews, approvals and QA, serving as the single point of contact between the client and the design and development team.
Sitemap, page priorities and content hierarchy were agreed with the client before design began, so design reviews were about execution, not direction.
Design comps moved forward with FPO image placeholders. Layout approvals didn't wait on photography while I sourced the final imagery in parallel.
Writing every page myself kept the voice consistent from the homepage to the service pages, and kept copy from becoming a dependency the schedule had to wait on.
Ease of use on phones was a stated goal from day one. Layouts were planned as stacking sections with call and schedule actions always in reach, not a desktop site squeezed down later. I ran QA across the site on both before launch.
The About page turns family records into a narrative a customer can scan in a minute. These are the moments it is built around.
Colorado SpringsFounder Jacob starts the company with his son, George W.
OaklandThe family moves west by train, first working out of the boxcars they arrived in.
San FranciscoGeorge P., who joined at 14, moves the business to Ocean Avenue.
3281 Mission StHome of the DUPLEX furnace, known for its "soothing heat."
Richmond DistrictGeorge A. relocates the company.
Fifth generationGreg, great-great-grandson of the founder, takes the lead.
Service and booking come first on every page, on desktop and phone. The family history, the credentials and the Comfort Club each have a clear home, and every one of them points back to the same action: book the call.
The review that meant the most came from the family. The wife of the fourth-generation owner, mother of today's owner, long retired and in her 90s, was so moved by how the site looked that she reached out to thank me personally.
Owning project management and production, along with strategy, content and QA, meant the decisions made in the brief survived all the way to launch. The site the family approved is the site the strategy described.