Not your father's remodelers: Priesing (left) and Menke (center) on Myers' Vespa.
Carolyn Hanisch Not your father's remodelers: Priesing (left) and Menke (center) on Myers' Vespa.

Cost-effective marketing tools, blogs are in many ways ideal for remodelers: informal, friendly, and constantly changing. They can stimulate interaction, build trust, and provide a unique window into the values and personalities of the people that clients will be working with.

Consider Myers Constructs, a woman-owned, Philadelphia design/build company whose Web site, www.myersconstructs.com, radiates irreverent charm and a lively appreciation for detail. The section titled “News” functions as a blog in that it includes a running dialogue headed “Events and things that interest us.” Various staff chime in.

What interests them? For starters, construction-related sites (a home energy audit provider, a wind turbine manufacturer, a tank-less water heater); amusing and relevant articles, travel photos, and YouTube videos; and company and local news.

The buzz from younger people in particular is that “some sort of regular [Web site] updating is very good on many levels,” says Diane Menke, co-owner with Tamara Myers. “It keeps us high in the search engines. It entertains the clients and gets them interested.”

Site updates also come in the form of “Work in Progress” photos that Menke snaps every few days and e-mails, along with blog entries, to self-taught Web wrangler and office manager Dana Priesing, who keeps everything current using open-source (free) software called Bluefish.

“The more we do this, the more we understand what’s interesting about what we do,” Menke says. “The general feedback is: ‘Give us more!’”