Kore Design+Build: one site for a firm that both designs and builds

Most residential projects involve an architect who draws and a contractor who builds, with a homeowner stuck in the middle when the two disagree. Kore does both jobs. The site had to make that clear in about four seconds, then prove it with finished work.

The problem with two audiences

A design-build firm is selling to someone who has usually been burned by the split model, and to general contractors and architects who might refer work. Those two groups want different things from the same homepage: one wants reassurance and finished kitchens, the other wants scope and capability.

I designed the page so the hero carries the positioning, the services row splits the two halves of the business immediately, and the portfolio does the persuading. Everything below that is depth for whoever wants it.

Content model before pixels

Projects are a custom post type with fields for location, square footage and project type, so a finished job gets added once and appears in the featured grid, the portfolio archive and any related listings. The office adds a project on Monday without calling me.

Site-wide settings live in Carbon Fields rather than hard-coded in templates, so contact details, service areas and calls to action can change without a deploy.

Built on Sage 10

Blade layouts and partials, Composer autoloading, Vite and Tailwind. Design tokens from the Figma file go into the Tailwind config and get mirrored into theme.json, so the block editor only offers the palette and type scale the design actually defines. Editors cannot produce an off-brand page because the off-brand options are not there.

The whole homepage loads in 22 requests. A typical multipurpose construction theme runs 80 to 150 before a single project photo appears.

That number is not a vanity metric for a construction firm. Their clients look them up on a phone, standing in a half-finished basement, on one bar of signal. Page weight is the difference between an enquiry and a back button.

SEO as an ongoing engagement

The work did not stop at launch. I run their search work continuously: keyword research, new content written against real queries, and the technical side. That is unusual for a build project and it is the part I would point to if you asked what I actually do for clients.

What I would do differently

The portfolio filtering could go further. Right now projects filter by type; location filtering would serve the service-area searches better, and that is on the list.