You want to show your work online. Good. The question is whether a folder of photos does the job, or whether you need a page for every project and a map besides.
We will not hand you a price list. Anyone who quotes a number without knowing your job count is guessing. What we can do is show you exactly what moves the price, so you can read a quote and know if it is fair.
What are you actually buying when you add a job gallery?
You are buying proof. A homeowner in Cary or Wake Forest wants to know whether you have done work like theirs, near them, and whether it looked good.
There are three ways to deliver that proof:
- A simple gallery. Photos in a grid, maybe with short captions.
- Per-job pages. Each finished job gets its own page with a story.
- A job map. Past jobs plotted so a visitor can see where you have worked.
Each one costs more than the last. Each one also proves more. The trick is buying only as much proof as your sales process can use.
What does a basic photo gallery cost to build and keep up?
Least of the three, by a wide margin. It is mostly layout work: a clean grid, a way to open a photo larger, and captions.
Three things move the price even here:
- How many photos. More images means more sorting, cropping and captioning.
- Photo handling. Phone photos are huge. Someone has to resize and compress them so the page loads fast on a cell connection. You can check how your current pages do with our speed test.
- Who adds new photos. If you can upload them yourself, that is a bit more build. If you email them to the studio every time, that is a small bill that never ends.
A gallery is a fine answer for plenty of crews. Its limit is that a photo with no story is just a photo.
What do per-job pages add, and why do they cost more?
Words, structure and search value. A job page tells the visitor what the crew found, what they did and what came out of it.
Take A New Leaf Painting in Jacksonville. Each finished job there has its own page: what the crew found, the prep and repairs, the products and colors, the result in photos, and the HOA approval details neighbors ask about. That last detail is the kind of thing a gallery never answers.
This costs more because every job is a small piece of writing, not a single design. The page template is built once. The content is the expensive part, and it scales with every job you add.
What makes a job map a bigger project than it looks?
A map looks like a widget. It is really a dataset.
Each pin needs a location, and each location needs to be accurate enough to be useful without publishing a customer's exact address. Someone has to decide how precise to be, and then apply that rule to every job, every time.
Then the map has to connect to something. A pin that opens nothing is a decoration. A pin that opens a job page is a sales tool, which is why the map and the job pages tend to be bought together.
Add the map service itself and you have ongoing questions about licensing and load time. None of it is exotic. All of it is work that a pretty screenshot hides.
How much of the cost is the one-time data entry for past jobs?
More than most owners expect. This is the line item that surprises people.
Building the pages is a fixed task. Filling them is a per-job task. For a contractor with years of finished work in folders, texts and old invoices, the real question is how far back to go.
A New Leaf is the high end here. Their site plots about five hundred past jobs on a map of Northeast Florida, so a homeowner can see whether the crew has painted near them before calling. That is a strong feature. It is also five hundred records someone had to gather, place and check.
Our advice: pick a cutoff. Your best recent jobs do most of the persuading. Add older ones in batches if the first batch earns its keep.
Do town pages change the math?
They can, and in your favor. If you serve several towns, a map and job pages let each town page show real work from that place.
A New Leaf did this. Every town page carries its own finished jobs and its own map, and never borrows another town's name or a neighbor's job captioned as local. A page for Garner that shows Garner work says something true. A page that swaps the town name into the same paragraph says nothing.
The cost is in the rule: each job belongs to a place, and the site has to honor that everywhere. It is modest extra build work if the job data is clean from the start. It is painful if it is bolted on later.
How does a back office change the ongoing cost?
This is where one-time and monthly costs split. If jobs live in a spreadsheet and a developer copies them into the site, every new job costs you a ticket.
If there is an office behind the site, you add the job yourself. For A New Leaf, we built a page builder where the owner edits any page with every version kept, a media library, and sign-ins for the office and the crew that each see only their part.
A back office raises the build price. It lowers the cost of every job after that. For a crew finishing jobs weekly, it pays for itself. For a crew finishing a few a year, it might not.
Which option fits a crew with ten jobs a year versus one with hundreds?
Take a position. Here is ours.
About ten jobs a year. Build a good gallery, then write up your three or four best jobs as full pages. Skip the map. A handful of pins looks thin, and the data entry is not worth it yet.
A few dozen a year. Go with job pages for everything you finish, and add the map once you have enough jobs that pins cluster across your service area.
Hundreds of jobs. Job pages, map, town pages and a back office. At this volume, doing it by hand is the expensive choice.
If you are unsure, start with the cheaper step that does not block the next one. Ask the builder to store each job as structured data from day one. Then a gallery today can become a map later without a redo. Our contractor website design work starts from that idea.
How do you ask for a fair quote?
Ask for the three pieces priced separately: the gallery, the job pages, the map. Then ask these questions:
- How many past jobs does the price include entering, and what does each extra batch cost?
- Who writes the job content, and who supplies the photos?
- How are photos resized so pages stay fast on a phone?
- How do I add next month's job, and does it cost anything?
- How is a job's location handled so customers' addresses stay private?
A vendor who answers these plainly is one to keep talking to. A vendor who says "it depends" and stops has not done this before. If you want to see what a full build involves, read the A New Leaf Painting case study or our custom web development page.
Your next step this week
Count your finished jobs from the last two years and pick your ten best. Note which ones have good before and after photos. That list is the most useful thing you can bring to any quote, ours or anyone else's, and it tells you right away which of the three options you are really shopping for.