The site used to feel like a stack of cards. Every page had three or four panels with their own borders, shadows, and one-off styles. It worked but it felt assembled, not designed. The data was good. The wrapper around it was busy.
So I rebuilt the front end. Most of the work is invisible if you just came to check a quote. The form is where it was, the verdict math is the same, the cost guides are the same database. What changed is how the screen reads when you land on it.
A few specific things if you noticed them:
The cost guide pages now show price distribution as a bar chart instead of a single range bar. You can hover any bar and see how many homeowners paid in that bucket. It is the same underlying data, just rendered as a shape instead of a number. For most homeowners that shape tells you more in two seconds than a list of percentiles ever did.
The browse page (the one with every service on it) used to be a long scroll through every category. Now each service family collapses by default. You click the one you care about and it expands in place. The whole catalog fits on one screen now. If you came in looking for HVAC, you do not have to scroll past Bathroom Remodeling and Cleaning to get there.
The verdict screen has a horizontal bar showing where your quote falls inside the local distribution. Your dot lights up in the verdict color (green if fair, amber if high, blue if low). It replaces a gauge that always required a moment of interpretation.
The contribution moment is now a deep teal section near the bottom of every page. The reason it is dark is so it stops feeling like another panel. Sharing what you paid is the only thing that keeps this database alive, and the section that asks for it deserves visual weight the rest of the page does not have.
Most of the underlying logic is unchanged. The taxonomy is the same. The submission flow is the same. The free verdict is still free. The deeper detail is still earned by contributing one real report. If you were here last week, none of your unlock state changed. The browsing, search, sort, and pagination all behave the same way they always did.
A few things did move around. The related-services links on each cost guide now sit inside the dark closing section instead of hanging in their own strip below it. The header search is centered now instead of pushed to one side. The footer carries the logo properly instead of just the wordmark.
The header search also got smarter while I was in there. Typing "HVAC in Baltimore" or "Baltimore HVAC" now jumps straight to the city page when one exists. The autocomplete shows that as a "Go to Baltimore page" row at the top, ahead of the regular service matches. The quote-check form on the home page is unchanged. It still wants the service and your quoted price, not a free-text query.
The other quiet but important change is on the data side. The site now captures size and home context on the jobs where it actually matters: tonnage for HVAC, gallons for water heaters, squares for roofing, linear feet for fence, single-family versus townhouse versus condo for most things. The cost guide page splits its range by home-size band once a band has enough reports to be honest, so a small place is not being compared against a big one. Older reports without size context sit in the dataset with a "size not reported" label, and the page tells you when the range is still being assembled rather than pretending the average covers your house. The submit form also asks when the work was done, not just when the report was filed, because "paid in March 2025" tells a future visitor more than "reported in April 2026."
While I was cleaning things up I also pulled out the third-party referral options that used to sit at the bottom of the verdict page when a quote came back high or there was not enough data. The reasoning was simple. They were not earning real money at this traffic level, the labeling was getting harder to keep clean as the site grew, and the moment we have enough volume for it to matter, bringing homeowner leads to local pros directly is a better thing for me to build than passing them off to a competitor. The verdict page now closes with the contribution moment and the share-your-quote link, and that is it.
Nothing here changes the data model or what gets indexed. The same Google-indexable pages are still indexed. The same provider names stay behind the contributor wall and never appear publicly. Content safety and moderation work exactly the same way.
If something feels broken or off, that is on me. The redesign touched almost every template, and the kind of bugs that live in a redesign do not always show up until a real homeowner is using the page on a real device. The support form on /support goes straight to my inbox.