What a construction website has to do
A construction company website is read by three audiences at once — owners prequalifying a bidder, trades looking for work, and subcontractors looking to bid — and the sites that work give each one its own path.
Key Takeaways
What makes a construction website work?
It answers three different readers without making any of them hunt. An owner's representative is checking whether you have built this building type at this value with this delivery method. A superintendent is checking whether you are hiring. A subcontractor is checking how to get on the bid list. Eight of the fourteen sites below put subcontractor prequalification or craft recruiting in the primary navigation rather than in the footer. That is a count of these fourteen firms, read on 2026-08-31 — not a survey of the industry, and these are large national builders whose constraints are not a regional contractor's.
Fourteen construction sites and what each one does
Each entry names the one mechanism that firm uses which the others mostly do not. Skip the ones that do not match your size.
1. Turner Construction — New York, NY
Careers is split into four separately labelled entry tracks, including a dedicated Labor & Skilled Trade path and a Military Professionals path, so field trades get their own funnel instead of being folded into one jobs page. A separate Become a Subcontractor route states prequalification requirements. turnerconstruction.com
2. McCarthy Building Companies — St. Louis, MO
Carries Craft Resources as a top-level nav item — a section addressed to its own craft workforce rather than to clients — alongside an English/Español site toggle. The work taxonomy splits into two trees, Buildings and Infrastructure. mccarthy.com
3. JE Dunn Construction — Kansas City, MO
The projects index filters on completion year populated with future years, so work still under construction is browsable by delivery date and every card carries its year. Most builder portfolios only show finished work. jedunn.com
4. Hensel Phelps — Greeley, CO
The project filter has a delivery-method axis — CM at Risk, Design Bid Build, Design Build, Progressive Design Build — which is the axis an owner's rep actually filters on when assembling a shortlist. henselphelps.com
5. Shawmut Design and Construction — Boston, MA
The work index filters on four simultaneous axes, including a Special Features axis of construction conditions— Seismic, Structural Renovation, Historic Preservation, Ground-Up. That lets a reader find the constraint they are facing rather than the sector they sit in. shawmut.com
6. Consigli Construction — Milford, MA
Treats Landmark Restoration, Libraries and Museums as first-class filterable sectors rather than lumping them under institutional, and puts Subcontractors in the top-level nav. consigli.com
7. Barton Malow — Southfield, MI
The Subcontractors and Vendors page publishes the literal prequalification document checklist — W-9, prior-year audited financials, OSHA 300/300A logs for the past three years, EMR letters, safety manual, bonding letter, insurance certificate — then routes bidding through a virtual plan room. A sub knows in one screen whether they qualify. bartonmalow.com
8. Holder Construction — Atlanta, GA
Safety is a top-level nav item and the page publishes real figures — a TRIR of 0.30 and an SBLI of 0.62, as displayed on 2026-08-31 — alongside the staff credentials held and the platform trade partners use to upload site-specific safety plans. holderconstruction.com
9. Mortenson — Minneapolis, MN
Publishes its own quarterly construction cost index with a per-city page for eight markets and prints the actual figures. A contractor running a public price index is a page type essentially no competitor has, and it earns links that a project gallery never will. mortenson.com
10. Layton Construction — Salt Lake City, UT
The homepage stat row puts an EMR of .53 above the fold, next to revenue and state count — an insurance and prequalification metric that owners screen on, placed where a marketing team would normally put an awards badge. Read 2026-08-31. laytonconstruction.com
11. Sundt Construction — Tempe, AZ
Names the specific trades it self-performs — concrete, electrical, mechanical, structural steel, pipe welding — instead of claiming "self-perform capabilities". The specificity is the differentiator; the phrase is not. sundt.com
12. Messer Construction — Cincinnati, OH
Collapses subcontractor entry into a single combined plan room, business portal and prequalification destination rather than three scattered links, and carries workforce-development and economic-inclusion sections as standing pages. messer.com
13. Brasfield & Gorrie — Birmingham, AL
Homepage counters report current book of work rather than lifetime totals— active projects and states with active projects, not "projects completed since 1964". Current scale is the thing an owner is actually assessing. brasfieldgorrie.com
14. Suffolk Construction — Boston, MA
Corporate nav links out to a venture arm on its own domain alongside a design practice and a named internal training school — positioning the builder as a group of businesses rather than a single contractor. suffolk.com
The portfolio is a prequalification document
A construction portfolio is not judged the way a restaurant's photo gallery is. The reader arrives with a specific building type, a value band and a delivery method already in mind, and is trying to answer one question: have they done this before. A grid of hero photographs sorted by nothing answers none of it.
The filters that earn their place are sector, delivery method, region and value. Hensel Phelps and Shawmut both let a reader combine several at once; JE Dunn adds completion year including future dates, which turns work in progress into evidence instead of hiding it until handover. If a project page cannot state the delivery method and the owner type, it is a photograph, not a credential.
Safety numbers belong on the site, not in the RFP response
EMR and TRIR are screening criteria. An owner's rep assembling a bid list is looking for them before a conversation happens, and a firm that makes them hunt has added a step that a competitor did not. Holder and Layton both publish theirs on the public site rather than holding them for the prequalification packet.
The caveat matters: publish the number only if it stands up. A stale or selectively framed safety figure on a public page is worse than no figure, because the reader will check it against the packet later.
Half the traffic is looking for work, not a builder
Skilled labour is the binding constraint on most construction firms, and the website is a recruiting channel whether or not it was designed as one. A single Careers link pointed at an applicant-tracking portal treats a journeyman electrician and a preconstruction manager as the same visitor.
Turner splits trades into their own track. McCarthy addresses its craft workforce in the primary nav. Sundt segments craft, veterans and interns separately. None of that is a design flourish — it is an acknowledgement that the person who can fill a crew slot does not read the same page as the person who can sign a contract.
Say what a subcontractor needs before they call
Barton Malow's approach is the one worth copying at any size: publish the document checklist. Financials, OSHA logs, EMR letters, bonding, insurance. A sub who cannot meet it self-selects out, and one who can arrives with the paperwork ready. Both outcomes save the preconstruction team a call, and neither requires a portal licence to imitate — a static page listing the same requirements does most of the work.
Every site above is a real, currently-operating construction firm. Each URL was fetched and confirmed to return that firm's own content on 2026-08-31. Figures such as Holder's TRIR and Layton's EMR are those firms' own published numbers as displayed that day, not our measurements — check the live page before quoting them. No conversion multiples or performance percentages appear on this page because we have not run a published A/B test on construction sites.
What we look for in a construction site audit
- Project pages that state delivery method, sector and owner type — not just photographs and a name.
- A portfolio filter an owner's rep would actually use. Sector and delivery method beat chronology.
- Craft recruiting separated from salaried recruiting, with the trade roles reachable in one tap on a phone.
- A subcontractor page that lists the prequalification documents before asking for a submission.
- Safety credentials that are current and match what the prequalification packet will say.
- A missed-call path. Bid questions arrive during the workday from people standing on a site; text-back catches the ones the office misses.
For the build itself, web design. If your work is residential or trade-specific rather than commercial, the contractor website design breakdown is the closer fit — it is a different search and a different reader. For budget, what a website costs.