GoLocalQuote website rebuild

GoLocalQuote is a Halifax-area service that connects homeowners with local contractors. I joined for a six-week placement through NSCC's IT Programming eCampus program. The deliverable was to support a full rebuild of the public website, covering front-end development, SEO, performance, and technical documentation.

The first week was an audit of the live site on desktop and mobile, including a PageSpeed Insights review and a walkthrough of the visitor flow. Three issues stood out:

• Performance. Mobile PageSpeed score of 33/100. Hero images and phone mockups were served as full-size PNGs, and render-blocking resources sat in the critical path.
• Information architecture. The entire site lived on a single homepage using anchor links as navigation, which meant every section was competing for the same URL in search and there was no path to build out service or location pages.
• Hero and CTAs. The H1 posed a question ("What service do YOU need?") rather than stating a benefit, and the primary calls-to-action were app-store badges. Web visitors had no clear way to request a quote on the site itself.

Before screenshots captured 2026-04-22 — full audit in docs/site-analysis.md.

The rest of the placement was spent working through the rebuild alongside the team:

• Front-end rebuild. Moved the layout into a Next.js project with a proper responsive structure. Replaced the text-heavy "How It Works" section with a three-step visual layout and rewrote the hero to lead with an outcome statement and a web-first call to action.
• Performance. Converted hero and mockup assets from PNG to WebP and AVIF, applied loading="lazy" on below-the-fold images, and cleaned up render-blocking resources in the critical path.
• SEO foundations. Page metadata, semantic heading structure, internal linking for a multi-page site, and LocalBusiness and FAQPage JSON-LD schema.
• Accessibility. Alt text on images, aria-labels on icon links, and contrast adjustments to raise the Lighthouse accessibility score.
• Documentation. Wrote up the site structure, the update process, and a maintenance checklist for whoever maintains the site next.

Every recommendation on the rebuild had to map to a specific outcome: load time, search visibility, or completion of a quote request. Working on a live client site made the trade-offs concrete in a way that coursework rarely does.

I used AI-assisted tools throughout the placement for drafting code, first-pass copy, and spot-checking PageSpeed traces. The final output was reviewed and edited so I could explain every decision end-to-end.

The rebuilt site is live at golocalquote.com. The full public case study, including before screenshots and the audit document, is in the GitHub repository.