Case Study: Rebuilding Craft Construction Management on Statamic

The Client

Craft Construction Management is an Indianapolis-based general contractor specializing in commercial, hospitality, office, retail, and multifamily construction across Central Indiana. Their portfolio includes high-profile Indianapolis builds — Shin Dig, The Bemberg, Shiloh's Corner, Exchange Whiskey Bar, and BRU Burger Bar locations in Bloomington and South Bend — many of them tenant-finish and restaurant-concept build-outs where construction quality meets design sensibility.

Why Rebuild?

The previous site was a Craft CMS build we shipped in 2024. It did the job, but as the portfolio grew and the marketing team took on more content work, a few pain points compounded: adding a new completed project meant wrangling Craft's matrix fields, image transforms required explicit template wiring, and the hosting/licensing overhead of Craft started to feel disproportionate to a brochure-plus-portfolio site that didn't actually need a relational database.

We proposed a rebuild on Statamic 6 for three concrete reasons: a simpler content model for the portfolio team, static-caching performance that wouldn't require a caching plugin to manage, and a cost-of-ownership that dropped by roughly two-thirds in year one once the Craft Pro + plugin stack dropped off the books.

The New Stack

• Statamic 6 on Laravel 12 — flat-file content, Bard editor, Antlers templating.

• Tailwind CSS + Alpine.js for the frontend — no framework heavy lifting for what is fundamentally a content-led site.

• Glide image transforms — all project photography auto-resized, WebP-converted, and responsive-served without template gymnastics.

• Static caching out of the box — pages serve as pre-rendered HTML, under 200ms TTFB on modest hosting.

• JsonLD.io for automated Schema.org structured data — LocalBusiness, ConstructionBusiness, and individual Project markup generated without hand-writing JSON-LD per page.

• Cloudflare + Turnstile on the contact form to keep bot traffic out of the inbox.

Portfolio-First Content Model

Construction clients hire GCs based on trust and track record. So the content architecture leads with the work. The homepage opens with a 'Selected Work' grid of featured project photography; each project gets its own entry with hero image, scope, client type, and photography. The marketing team can add a new completed build in five minutes using the Bard editor — no developer required, no deploy step.

Project entries are grouped by vertical: commercial, hospitality and restaurant, multifamily, office and tenant finish, retail. That mirrors how clients actually search — 'restaurant build-out contractor Indianapolis' is a real query with real intent, and the new IA gives Google a clean category page to rank.

Local SEO Groundwork (What Shipped with Launch)

• Keyword-targeted page titles on every indexable page — 'Indianapolis General Contractor,' 'Commercial Construction Indianapolis,' 'Restaurant Build-Out Contractor Indiana,' 'Tenant Finish Contractor Indianapolis.'

• Structured data — LocalBusiness, ConstructionBusiness, and a Project schema on each featured build. Address, service area, and business hours baked into the homepage JSON-LD.

• Service-area pages naming Indianapolis, Carmel, Fishers, Noblesville, Bloomington, South Bend, and Lafayette — signaling regional authority without keyword-stuffing.

• Alt text on every project photograph with descriptive, search-aligned language (client name + build type + location).

• Internal linking between category pages, project entries, and the services section — so every page has a clear path back to the conversion points.

• Clean URL structure ('/projects/shin-dig,' '/services/commercial-construction') that reads well in search results and social shares.

• Open Graph + Twitter Card metadata on every entry so project pages preview cleanly when shared in email or on social.

Performance

Lighthouse scores in the mid-90s on mobile at launch, up from mid-70s on the previous Craft build. Time-to-first-byte under 200ms thanks to Statamic's static cache. First Contentful Paint and Largest Contentful Paint comfortably in the 'Good' zone of Core Web Vitals. The construction-photography hero images — normally a performance killer — ship as appropriately-sized WebP via Glide.

What Other Indianapolis GCs Can Learn

Three patterns from this project that apply to most construction and trades marketing sites:

• Lead with the portfolio. If your work is your best sales asset, it should be the first thing above the fold and the most reachable content on the site.

• Get the structured data in on day one. LocalBusiness + service-area markup takes a few hours to implement and compounds for years — retrofitting it after launch means waiting for Google to re-crawl and re-index everything.

• Think in verticals, not just keywords. 'Restaurant build-out contractor' and 'tenant finish contractor' are high-intent queries where a category page beats a blog post every time. Map them to pages, not posts.

See It Live

Visit craft-mgmt.com. If you're an Indianapolis-area general contractor, design-build firm, or trades business thinking about a website refresh, we'd be happy to chat about what a Statamic rebuild would look like for you.