How We Rebuilt SJ4 Construction's Website: From Wix to a Site That Catches Every Inquiry
Audie Sysaath — October 26, 2026
SJ4 Construction builds two or three custom homes and a few large remodels a year in McKinney, all of it from referrals. Joel Cequina runs the builds. Susie Cequina co-owns the company and is a REALTOR® with OnDemand Realty, so the same family can find the lot and sell the house you are leaving. Their website said none of that. It had four pages, no contact form, no analytics, and had not changed in eleven months.
Joel and Susie are family, which is how the conversation started. In six weeks the site went from Wix to a custom site with ten pages and eight project pages, a lead system for both owners, live analytics, and a project journal Joel posts to from his phone, with a page editor behind it. Here is the short version: what changed, what it does for them, and who owns it. The detail is at the end for anyone who wants it.
At a glance
- Client: SJ4 Construction, McKinney, Texas. Custom homes, whole-home remodels, water and fire restoration. Real estate with Susie Cequina, OnDemand Realty.
- Before: A four-page Wix site. No contact form, no analytics, three pages at placeholder addresses.
- After: 18 addresses in the sitemap: 10 pages and 8 project pages, with 176 described photos. SJ4 Leads for both owners, an analytics tab with a Google Search view, a project journal with a page editor, and a Guide for the owners.
- Timeline: Proposal and design Sep 15 to Oct 10, 2026. Site live overnight Oct 13 to 14. Lead tools and the journal by Oct 21, the restoration pages Oct 24, the page editor Oct 25.
- Built with: A small custom app, not a website builder. Photos in three sizes. Email through Resend. AI for the journal drafts and the photo descriptions.
- Running cost: Paid by SJ4 directly to the providers. No platform subscription, no monthly fee to us.
- Who owns it: SJ4. The domain, the code, the database and every account are in their name.
- See it: sj4construction.com
What changed, at a glance
The old site could not take an inquiry, could not say where a visitor came from, and had not been touched in eleven months. It was not slow. Google scored it 92 on a phone, and we told Joel and Susie plainly that speed was not their problem. The new site does the three things a business website is for: it gets found, it catches the inquiry, and it shows the work.
| Before (Wix) | After (new site) | |
|---|---|---|
| Pages | 4, three of them at placeholder addresses | 18: 10 pages and 8 project pages |
| Project photos | A few galleries | 176, each one described for Google and screen readers |
| Contact | An email link. Nothing recorded. | A form into a lead log. Both owners alerted, the client gets a confirmation. |
| Analytics | None | Google Analytics, live visitors and a Google Search view, inside the lead system. Every lead's source recorded. |
| Old addresses | Errors | Every old address sends people to the right page |
| Home page weight | 1.9 MB | 616 KB |
| Updating projects | By hand in Wix, last done 11 months earlier | From a phone or in a page editor, drafted by AI, published by a person |
Before: Google PageSpeed Insights on a phone, Sep 16, 2026. After: Google PageSpeed Insights on a phone, Oct 26, 2026.
The website
Real pages for the things SJ4 does: Home, Custom Homes, Remodeling, Water Damage, Fire and Smoke Damage, Projects, About, Buy or Sell, Contact, and the builder associations they belong to. Eight project pages followed, each with its own gallery and a full-size photo viewer, and the Projects page opens on all of them with Homes, Remodels and Restoration as filters. Susie's page links her 31 five-star reviews and carries the two notices Texas requires of a licensed agent.
Everything is built so Google and the AI assistants can read it: real pages, a description on every photo, the structured data that says who is who, and a redirect from every old address so nothing was lost in the move. Privacy is built in. Project names use the street, never a house number or a homeowner's name, and names visible in photos are blurred, down to a child's name on a shelf.
The two restoration pages came in the weeks after launch, written around what people search after a leak or a fire: what to do first, and how the job runs with the insurance adjuster. SJ4 handles the whole job, start to finish: water removal and drying, smoke and soot cleanup, tear-out and the rebuild, with the same two people the whole way.
SJ4 Leads: every inquiry reaches both owners
The contact form feeds a private lead system that works like an app on a phone. An inquiry goes to Joel and Susie both, and into the log. Whoever is free taps "I'll take it", and the other one sees who has it. Each lead carries a status, notes, and where it came from, including the AI assistants by name. Spam is screened but never hidden, and an Analytics tab shows live visitors, the Google Analytics reports and a Google Search view from Search Console, inside the same login.
The site makes one promise on every page: a personal reply within one to three business days, and the lead system keeps count. Smaller jobs, usually under $50,000, come to Audie Builds, and only with the client's OK: the client ticks a box, we get the details, and the system asks us to report back how it went. We are family, and the site says so wherever it mentions us.
The project journal: from Joel's phone to a page
This is the piece we are proudest of. Joel adds photos straight from his iPhone, and as each one lands the AI writes the one-line description Google and screen readers use, and flags faces, house numbers and weak shots. He records a voice note or types a rough line, and AI turns that into the update and the page. Every voice note is kept as its own note, so a dead battery loses nothing, and new notes can be worked into a page without rewriting what is already there.
Then there is the page editor. Edit the page opens the project's real page, drawn as it will look. Joel or Susie clicks any text to change it in place, drags photos into order or onto the before-and-after, drops new photos in, and taps Publish. Nothing changes on the website before that tap, and the tool blocks anything that looks like a street address on the way out. People can follow a project by email, and SJ4's first restoration job, Normandy Dr, is on the site with its dated updates.
The point of the journal is the eleven months the old site sat untouched. Updating a website by hand does not happen when you are running a job site. A voice note from the truck does. How the journal works, step by step.
Who owns it, and what it costs them
SJ4 pays the providers directly: hosting for the app and database, email, the AI for the journal, and photo storage. There is no website-builder subscription and no monthly fee to us.
They own everything. The domain, the code, the database and every account are in SJ4's name. If they ever want to work with someone else, they take the whole thing with them. That is how we think a small business's website should be set up.
Could this work for your business?
We build this for local service businesses in Dallas-Fort Worth: contractors, remodelers, realtors and home services. A fast custom site that gets found, a lead log that alerts the owners, and the journal if your work is worth showing as it happens. We run our own business on the same tools, which is why we knew what SJ4 needed. Start on the websites and lead tools for local businesses page, read how the project journal works, or write to us below.
The search work, piece by piece
People ask what "built for search" means in practice, so here is the list. None of it is a trick. It is the groundwork a site needs so that when someone in McKinney asks Google or ChatGPT for a custom home builder, there is a real page with real answers to point to. Each row was checked on the live site before this was published.
| What we did | On the SJ4 site | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Real pages, built on the server | Every page is plain HTML before any script runs. Eighteen addresses in the sitemap: ten pages and eight project pages. | Google and the AI assistants read the words without running the site's code. Page-builder sites often need scripts to show their content. |
| One title and description per page | Each page names the service, the city and the company, such as "Water Damage Restoration and Mitigation in McKinney" or "Fire and Smoke Damage Restoration in McKinney". | It is the line a searcher reads in the results, and the first thing an assistant quotes. |
| Structured data | The business with its six cities, both owners as founders, Susie as a real estate agent with her license name and brokerage, the site name with Audie Builds as the maker, office hours that match the Business Profile, each project as an article with its photos, the photographer's credit and Lauren Kreiling as the designer on the three remodels she designed, the water and fire restoration pages each as a service with what it includes, and FAQs built from the questions actually shown on each page. | Tells Google who is who and what each page is, in the format it asks for. FAQ markup that matches the visible page is the only kind Google trusts. |
| Redirects from every old address | Ten old addresses, the Wix placeholders, two WordPress addresses Google still listed, three old project addresses and the old restoration address, send visitors to the right new page with a permanent redirect. One new page is not public yet, so its old address goes to Projects with a temporary redirect for now. Checked live. | Google carries the old pages' history over instead of starting from zero, and the Business Profile's old link now lands on About instead of an error. |
| A sitemap and a robots file | The sitemap lists all eighteen public pages with the date each last changed, updates itself when a project is published, leaves drafts out, and is submitted in Search Console, which is set up as a Domain property. The robots file points to it and keeps the private lead system out of search. | Google finds new project pages on its own, and nothing private gets indexed. |
| One address for every page | www., the host's test address and trailing slashes all forward to sj4construction.com, and every page names its one true address with a canonical tag. | Google never sees two copies of the same page, so nothing splits. |
| Private pages kept out | SJ4 Leads, previews, drafts and the form's thank-you page carry a don't-index tag. Any copy of the site that is not on the real domain blocks search engines entirely. | The back office and the duplicates never show up in results. |
| Link previews | Open Graph and Twitter card tags on every page. | A link shared on Facebook, LinkedIn or in a text shows the photo and the title, not a blank card. |
| A description on every photo | 176 project photos, each with a written description of what is in the picture. The AI writes it as the photo is added, photos from before the tool catch up on their own, and a description someone typed is never replaced. | Image search reads it, screen readers read it, and assistants use it to describe the work. |
| Photos in three sizes, kept for a year | Each photo is saved at 600, 1200 and 2000 pixels wide, and a phone downloads the size it needs. The main photo loads first and the rest load as you scroll. Browsers keep photos for a year, the server keeps them in memory, and the logo went from 26 KB to 4.7 KB. | The home page is 616 KB on a phone, a third of the old site, and repeat visits cost nothing. |
| Fonts served from the site | No request to Google Fonts on any page. | One fewer connection on every load, and the words appear at once. |
| Plain who, what, where sentences | The home page says what SJ4 builds, where, and who runs it, in one paragraph. Project pages are named by the street and the city, such as Van Landingham Drive Remodel. | Assistants quote sentences, not slogans, and a street name gives local relevance without a house number. |
| Google Analytics, Search Console and lead sources | Analytics on every page, with a sent inquiry counted as a key event. A Google Search view from Search Console sits inside SJ4 Leads and keeps the search history over time. Each lead stores where it came from, including the AI assistants by name, and what the person typed in How did you hear about us. | You learn which searches the site shows up for and which channel sends real inquiries, not just visitors. |
| One business name everywhere | SJ4 Construction, with the McKinney address and phone, on the site and in the structured data. The phone number is set in one place, so it changes everywhere at once. | Google matches the site to the Business Profile when the name, address and phone agree. |
| Google Business Profile and Bing Places | The profile's hours and phone were corrected to match the site, its website link is tagged so those visits are counted on their own, and Bing Places was set up from the Google profile. | The listing and the site agree, the visits from the listing are counted, and Bing feeds ChatGPT search and Copilot. |
| Profiles linked both ways | SJ4's Houzz and Nextdoor profiles are in the business structured data, and the footer links to Google reviews, Houzz and Nextdoor on every page. | Google ties the profiles to the business, and a visitor can check the reviews without leaving the page. |
| A review link | sj4construction.com/review forwards to Google's review form, for texts, emails and a QR code on printed cards. | Asking for a review becomes one tap. No incentives, ever. |
| The legal lines a licensed agent needs | Both TREC notices linked in the footer and on Buy or Sell. | Required wherever a Texas license holder advertises, and a trust signal to anyone who knows to look. |
Checked against the live site between Oct 20 and Oct 26, 2026. Still open on SJ4's side, so not claimed here: indexing requests for the project and restoration pages, the restoration categories on the Business Profile, the older Houzz and Nextdoor profiles, linking Search Console to Google Analytics, and the reviews plan. Not part of the project: link building, paid ads, review stars in results, rank tracking.
The rest of what we built, for the detail-minded
The audit. We started in mid-September, public pages only. The Wix site had four pages, and three of them lived at addresses named "blank", "blank-1" and "blank-2". The Contact button opened an email draft with a misspelled subject line, and nothing was recorded anywhere. There was no Google Analytics and no tag manager. Google still listed addresses from an even older WordPress site, and those ended in an error page; the Google Business Profile's own website button went to one of them. Susie's previous brokerage website had gone dark, so her 31 five-star reviews on RateMyAgent had no home on the web.
The restoration pages. Water damage went up the week after launch and was widened on Oct 24 to cover the whole job: water removal, drying, tear-out and the rebuild, with mitigation and restoration explained in plain words. Fire and smoke damage followed the same day: smoke and soot cleanup, odor removal, the water from the firefight, tear-out and the rebuild. Each page has a what-to-do-first list, six service cards, the five steps of working with the insurance adjuster, a repair-it-or-remodel-it-while-the-walls-are-open option, a visible FAQ, a call button and a form button that preselects the type of damage. Restoration is in the main menu, and the contact form asks what happened.
Who is who on the site. A Designer spotlight on About for Lauren Kreiling, SJ4's in-house interior designer, who designed three of the featured remodels; SJ4 did the build-out on every one of them. And a plain line on what SJ4 takes on: the Remodels page has a Smaller projects section, and the FAQ on Remodels and Contact says that a single bathroom or a smaller job, usually under $50,000, goes to Audie Builds. Each mention says Audie is family to them and that Audie Builds is an independent company with its own contract and warranty.
How the referral works. On the form, a remodel under $50,000 shows a short note and an unticked box, Introduce me to Audie Builds. Ticked, the client gets an introduction email, we get the details at once, and Joel and Susie get a short note instead of an alert. Not ticked, the lead is tagged Fit for Audie Builds, and either owner can email the client an introduction offer with a Yes button, or send it straight over when the client said yes on the phone. The email we receive carries a link to report how it went, Reached, Hired, Not Hired or No Answer, and the answer shows on the lead's timeline. A Referred tab and the monthly report count referrals and their results. The three referral emails are editable in SJ4 Leads with a live preview.
The reply promise, counted. A lead's Waiting marker turns red after three business days, and the monthly report shows the share answered in time. Deleted leads can be restored for 30 days. First-time setup for each owner is a link by email, with no password handed over by us.
Two more boxes and a Guide. A design request box on the form tags a lead Wants a Designer and adds a line to the owners' alert; nothing goes to Lauren directly. A Guide in the menu gives Joel and Susie four tabs. Grow: a shared to-do list, the reviews plan with the review link and a printable QR code, and copy-ready texts and emails. What's Built: the old site beside the new one, with why each change matters. Your Questions: plain answers to their questions, with sources. Build Reports: dated, with screenshots. There are no prices or hours anywhere in it.
Inside the journal. Photos come from the iPhone camera or library, HEIC files included, or from a computer; Joel drags them into order, picks the cover and the "before" shot, and can keep any photo off the website with one box. The AI writes each photo's description as it comes in and flags faces, house numbers, license plates and weak shots; a description someone typed is never replaced, and one that looks like a street address is thrown out. Each voice note is saved as its own note the moment it is turned into text, can be edited, deleted and restored for 30 days, and shows whether it is already in the page. Work in the new notes adds only what is new; Start over rewrites the page from every note. The page editor keeps every change as a draft until Publish, previews the project card and the Google result as they are typed, and Write These With AI drafts the card line and the Google title and description, with Undo. The Save button greys out until something changes, then shows the time it saved. Full-size originals stay private as the record, and the site serves small copies. Credits go on each project one per line, Interior design: Lauren Kreiling for example; they show under At a Glance, link to her spotlight, and go into the project's structured data. Followers confirm by email first and can leave in one click.
Frequently asked questions
Can you move my site off Wix or Squarespace without losing Google?
Yes. Every old address redirects to its new page, the sitemap and structured data go up on day one, and we check each redirect live. SJ4's old Wix and WordPress addresses all land on the right pages today.
Do I own the site?
Yes. Domain, code, database and accounts are in your name from the start, and you pay the providers directly.
What does it cost to run each month?
The providers' own bills, paid directly: hosting, email, storage and AI. There is no website-builder subscription and no monthly fee to us.
Can my team post projects from their phones?
Yes. Photos from the camera roll, a voice note, an AI draft, and a person approves before anything goes live. The one thing the AI writes on its own is each photo's one-line description, and you can change it.
What does a new website cost?
Websites for local businesses start at $5,000, and the lead tools and the journal are quoted per project. Running costs are separate and paid by you, directly to the providers. That is the price of our service, not a figure from SJ4's project.