Higgins Building Group

A full website rebuild for an established Hickory, North Carolina builder of custom luxury homes, designed so the company's own project photography carries the experience.

Live public site · client work

My role

Led discovery, information architecture, design, development, stakeholder review, and deployment through Higgins Digital.

Live website GitHub showcase

An architect's desk with a house model and plans, overlooking a finished home.

The problem

Higgins Building Group had years of finished custom homes and the photography to prove it, but the old site showed that work at thumbnail scale inside a dated layout. The strongest asset the business owned was the thing visitors saw least.

My contribution

Company leadership commissioned the rebuild, and I ran it independently through Higgins Digital: stakeholder discovery, a content audit, information architecture, design, development, quality assurance, a revision round worked directly from the owner's change list, and the production deployment.

What I built

The new site lets the homes do the selling. Project photography runs full width, a filterable portfolio opens each photo in a lightbox, a five-stage process page explains how a build works, and a "Begin a conversation" path sits in the header on every page.

Rebuilt structure: home, about, portfolio, process, properties, testimonials, and contact.
An optimized image library served at the right size for each device.
A navy-and-gold design system drawn from the company's logo, with a mobile-first layout.
Protected contact and early-notice forms, search-ready metadata, and accessibility and reduced-motion passes.

How it works

A photo pipeline feeds every page, and inquiries go straight to the company.

Company photo library
Optimized responsive images
Site pages
Portfolio: filters + lightbox
Protected inquiry delivery

Higgins Building Group homepage with a full-width photo of a timber-frame home. — The rebuilt homepage leads with the company's own project photography and a clear path to view the work.

Key decisions

Full-width photography without the weight.

Every photo is prepared for the web and served at the size each device needs, so the work looks its best on a phone without a slow page.

Organize around how homeowners search.

Navigation follows the questions a prospective client asks: what have they built, how does a build work, and how do I start.

Stop spam quietly.

Forms are protected from abuse without making real homeowners solve a puzzle.

Outcomes & evidence

The production site at higginsbuildinggroup.com presents the company's homes, process, and contact paths in a modern responsive experience. In the owner's words on the public project page: "Davis took our old website and turned it into something that finally feels like Higgins Building Group."