Home services, 2024–25. Design and build. Live.
Good Fit Plumbing
I built a playful website for an Oakland plumber, with a coin visitors can collect to unlock coupons.
Scroll inside the screen to read the whole site. Or open the live site in a new tab.
Where it started
A licensed, union-trained plumber in Oakland runs a one-person shop and does one kind of work on purpose: water supply systems and fixtures. No drains, no sewer lines. He competes with franchise operations that have ad budgets, in a category where every website looks the same: a stock photo of a smiling technician, a phone number, a truck.
He couldn't outspend anyone, so the site had to be the one people remember. I designed and built it as a side-scrolling video game, the kind with brick blocks, a warp pipe, and a coin to collect, and made sure it still works for a homeowner with a leak who just wants to book a repair.
What made it hard
- A one-person shop, so the site sells one specialty instead of a full menu of services.
- The game couldn't get in the way. The audience is homeowners with a leak, not gamers.
- He wanted to be found in local search across six cities, so each city needed its own real page underneath the theme.
- The limits on what he does had to appear on every one of those city pages, because the wrong lead costs more than no lead.
What I built
The coin leads somewhere the business wants you to go
A question block floats over the top of the homepage. Click it and a coin pops out. Collect the coin and the coupons page unlocks. The cracked warp pipe beside it carries its own prompt to repair it. So there are two things to play with before you scroll, and the one that matters takes you to an offer. The play is wired to something the business wants, not sprinkled on top.
The theme holds all the way to the thank-you
Service categories are brick blocks. The blog is the Plumbing Playbook. When you send the contact form, the confirmation reads "Mission received — your plumbing team is assembling," after a thank-you that says "You did it, hero." A theme that stops at the top of the page is a costume. This one holds through the moment most sites drop it.
The playful parts still work for everyone
Skip-to-section links sit between the animated bands, and a visible accessibility control sits on the page. That's the unglamorous half of making something playful usable, and it's what keeps a homeowner in a hurry from fighting the page.
A disclaimer that turns away leads on purpose
Every city page repeats the same line: water supply systems and fixtures only, no drain clearing, no clog removal, no waste or sewer lines. It costs some inquiries, deliberately. A plumber dispatched to a job he doesn't do loses twice.
What isn't measured
- No analytics were captured before launch, so there's no before-and-after to show.
- The coin isn't tracked, so I can't say whether it sends more people to the coupons page.
- Two different phone numbers and two different ZIP codes are live across his directory listings.
Built with
See for yourself
Notes
The old pitch deck for this project described it as Hulu-inspired. It isn’t. It’s a platformer, the side-scrolling kind of video game, and the difference matters: the reference isn’t video, it’s play.
Tell me what you're working on.
Send me a little about your project or the role you're hiring for. I'll tell you whether it sounds like a fit.