Katz Web Design has completed a website for Mountain High Roofing, Inc., a Denver roofing company.
The Mountain High Roofing website is built on WordPress. It’s what I would consider to be a medium level of customization; the website is a custom website design with a few plugin customization options. It allows Mountain High to easily update their own content, and add articles to their blog. The code is well-structured for really good SEO results.
The project went quite smoothly; the copywriting was done by The Write Touch, and the previous website was easy to redirect: it had only been 4 pages.
Incorporating ServiceMagic.com ratings
One of the interesting things developing this site was trying to incorporate the company’s ServiceMagic.com rating. ServiceMagic is the 800 pound gorilla on the web for the service industry. My customers often love the website because it sends them lots of leads, but it charges a lot. One client told me that ServiceMagic charges $55.00 for every lead.
I hoped, since they charge so much, that the website would at least offer a quality API so that I could pull Mountain High’s ratings from their website using PHP or Javascript. I was hoping for a ServiceMagic API with a JSON feed of testimonials and ratings. Instead, there was nothing. I called their support team, and they confirmed no options for incorporating.
A sneaky CSS trick to get around ServiceMagic
Service Magic doesn’t allow access to their pages using techniques such as cURL, which would be easily manipulated and added to the website. I tried all sorts of better options before realizing I’d have to go old-school!
ServiceMagic gets a new header using CSS
Since there was no way to create an RSS feed using some RSS feed creation services, I had to resort to CSS trickery. I used an old-school iFrame that pulled in their rating summary pop-up, and then used css to add a header to the sidebar iFrame using absolute positioning. I added an invisible link that covers the entire iFrame and goes to the company’s full reviews. Voila, an external iFrame that is styled just like the company’s website. The end result I think looks great and serves its purpose.
