Investigation No. 001 · Contracting & facilities
GTY Contracting & Cleaning
A premium web presence and live pitch system for a contracting company competing against firms ten times its size.
plate No. 001 · XCL-2025-001 · specimen, not screenshot — the capture set replaces this plate when the photography of record is published
- id
- XCL-2025-001
- nature
- Client project
- status
- Live
- client
- GTY Contracting & Cleaning Services
- sector
- Contracting & facilities
- scope
- websites · conversion-systems · marketing-systems
- timeline
- 2025-11 — 2026-01
- stack
- Single-file HTML/CSS/JS · GA4 · Microsoft Clarity · FormSubmit · Cloudflare Pages
- evidence
- evidence: observed
Overview
GTY Contracting & Cleaning needed to win commercial contracts against established firms with larger portfolios and larger marketing budgets. We built a photography-led site with its own design system — deep navy and burnt orange, Fraunces display over Plus Jakarta Sans — treated mobile as its own product rather than a squeezed desktop, and wired honest measurement in from day one. We also built a live demo pitch system used in sales conversations. This case study describes what was built and why; it makes no outcome claims the measurement window hasn't earned. evidence: observed
Business context
GTY sells trust. A facilities contract is a multi-year commitment made by a risk-averse buyer, and the buying decision usually happens before the first phone call — on the website, at 11pm, on a phone. The previous web presence undersold the operation badly: the work was professional; the pixels weren't.
Challenge
The ask, in the client's words: "a website that makes us look as serious as we are." The reframe we proposed and the client confirmed: the site's real job is to de-risk the buyer's decision — every section should answer a hesitation, not display a service.
The buying decision usually happens before the first phone call — on the website, at 11pm, on a phone.
Strategy
Three commitments drove every decision:
- Photography over promises. Real work, shot properly, beats adjectives. The layout system was designed around large photographic evidence with quiet type.
- Mobile as the primary artifact. The buyer researches on a phone. The mobile experience was designed independently and verified across six viewport widths, with a persistent bottom action bar so the next step is always one thumb away.
- One action per page. Request a quote. Everything else is supporting evidence.
Decision making
Own design system, not the studio's. GTY's identity (navy, burnt orange, Fraunces) was built as its own token set. Our aesthetic never leaks into client work — the client owns a system, not a template.
Single-file architecture. The entire site ships as one self-contained HTML document: zero build chain for the client to maintain, zero framework decay, trivially portable. For a site of this shape, boring architecture is the ten-year choice.
Dual measurement. GA4 for quantitative structure, Microsoft Clarity for qualitative session understanding, and dual-channel form delivery so no enquiry can silently vanish. Measurement was installed before launch because outcomes claimed later are only honest if measurement was designed first.
The pitch system
Alongside the site we built a live sales demonstration — two synchronized apps sharing a realtime database — so GTY could show operational competence in the room instead of describing it. It turned the sales conversation from a brochure walkthrough into a demonstration.
Development
Hand-written HTML/CSS/JS, deployed on Cloudflare Pages at effectively zero hosting cost. No dependencies means no dependency updates: the maintenance burden for the client rounds to zero, which is what a system that compounds looks like at this scale.
Performance
Static single-file delivery from a global edge, with image weight as the only meaningful cost — managed through aggressive compression and lazy loading below the fold. Formal audit results live in the project's QA record.
Accessibility
Built against WCAG 2.2 AA at the design level: verified contrast pairs in the navy/orange system, visible focus states, labels on every field, and no hover-dependent information anywhere in the mobile experience.
Reflection
GTY sharpened a conviction: for trust-driven businesses, the website is the sales team's opening argument, and mobile is the room where it's delivered. The project also stress-tested our capture discipline — photography-led sites live or die on the quality of their evidence, and that lesson fed directly back into how we run every shoot since.
Future improvements
A structured project-gallery system with per-contract case pages is the natural next compound: each completed contract becoming a permanent proof asset rather than a photo in a folder.