We provide home maintenance and lawn care services for homeowners, second home/absentee owners, and strata/condos.
Based in Bowser, BC, we serve the mid-Vancouver Island area including Deep Bay, Fanny Bay, Qualicum Bay, Qualicum Beach and Parksville.
Call Handy Sandy Services for all your property maintenance needs, including:
Our handyman home repair service provides reliable high quality maintenance services to keep your property well maintained and looking great. Handy Sandy Services has a wide range of skills and works with a network of local contractors for small repairs and odd jobs to larger projects and renovations.
A well cared for yard can make a well maintained home look even better. We offer complete yard care for your lawn and garden. Whether you have a small yard or larger strata, require gardening or landscaping with an irrigation system, Handy Sandy Services can help you keep your yard looking great.
An essential part of home and property maintenance is tackling odd jobs in a timely manner. Handy Sandy Services offers handyman services to get those odd jobs completed by using the varied skills necessary to maintain your residence, second home, or strata.
Call us for your handyman needs:
A properly installed and maintained irrigation system can make a well maintained yard an exceptional one.
We plan, install, adjust and repair irrigation systems. If you are considering an irrigation system, or you have an irrigation system that isn't performing properly, using too much water, or needs adjustment call to discuss the solutions available:
Doing business since 2005 and a member of the Lighthouse Country Business Association, Handy Sandy Services in Bowser offers reliable handyman home maintenance services from repairs to renovations, providing home repair, yard care and irrigation sytems.
Our handyman service covers Bowser, Deep Bay, Fanny Bay, Qualicum Bay, Qualicum Beach, and Parksville.
Contact information:
Sandra TurneyWebsite information: the Handy Sandy Services website
Select the menu options, the Handy Sandy logo heading, click the tour switch in the upper right corner or sit back and watch the tour to be on your way to learning about the many Handy Sandy services offered. Whatever your property maintenance needs, Handy Sandy Services can get the job done.
Select the menu options, the Handy Sandy logo heading, click the tour switch in the upper right corner, or just sit back and watch the tour to be on your way to having Handy Sandy Services fix whatever is broken.
The website for Handy Sandy Services was created to augment extensive local presence in Bowser BC, while consuming minimum resources of time and capital. The website is meant to act as an electronic business card of sorts (and includes a rough vcard in the about page as well) for initial contact and subsequently for reference to existing customers. The overall design of the website is consistent with the existing marketing, business card, logos, and roadside signboards.
The website is designed as a single page website for several reasons:
To service our audience the website adapts to the device (popularly misnamed 'responsive'). The size, aspect ratio, orientation and text sizes scale reasonably well, given a broad range of supported browsers.
In the various tradeoffs, was the desire to maintain the look of the pre-existing business card,complete with border, and the importance of keeping the contact info on a sticky footer. This results in some browsers leaving a bit of underflow (going under the footer) but gains wider browser support. We also traded 'being semantically correct' for better representation of the website. Whether CSS3, html, jscript, menus, or SEO, we opted to stay true to the business card style that is well known to our customers. This clean and simple look fits well with the overall 'conversion goal' of the website, namely that the website visitor give Sandy at Handy Sandy Services a call. It does not attempt to quantify this via analytics or web stats as would be more appropriate for a larger organization (in short we define 'conversion' when our phone rings and we answer).
In contrast to businesses with a potential global footprint, local contractors may not benefit from blogs, top 10 lists, and instructional videos. To these types of businesses, the proliferation of smartphones/small screen devices and the localization of the internet, a website that gets their phone number/email in front of prospective customers is essential for converting a sale. Some features, such as adding a blog may sound interesting, but would siphon off resources from profitable work, particularly if one wants to do it well. An e-storefront could be added, but at present the economics indicate it would be unprofitable, and at best minimally profitable. Should the website expand in those areas the single page approach should be re-evaluated.
Prior to adding internal links, the website required use of parameter configuration in google webmaster tools. This consists of defining ?page=x as pagination of content. With the internal links this may long be necessary. Also of note is that google handles hidden content fine, possibly because the content can be specified via command line parameter (?page=0-5,403,404,411). Google+ is used to link to the website with verified owner style which helps google and other SEs validate the website. The exposure of google+ eliminates the need to try to optimize and allows the website to focus on delivering the best experience to the user rather than SEO. Htaccess had to be configured with a full path (not usually recommended) to get the host server to pass the ?page=404 on a 404 error. The tradeoff means that just get anywhere into www.handysandyservices.ca and the user is taken care of (even www.handysandyservices.ca/alskdfj.jdk is fine). While most 403/404 error pages are intent on humor or pointing out some grievous error, we prefer to work that error into our regular work; after all that's what Handy Sandy Services does.. fix stuff.
The result is a compact small business website that adapts (or misnamed 'responsive') from a business card blackberry sized device to large screen trade-show presentation without losing sense of proportion and most importantly without losing the essential elements for converting the web-user to a customer. There are many items that can be improved, such as the following:
At present these items don't justify the effort (to put it simply they are diminishing returns) but may be addressed in the future
While this adaptive (responsive) website uses fairly advanced CSS3, HTML5, jscript, integrated 404/403, and does reasonably well in SEO, it maintains wide browser support while keeping a user presentation that is clean, matches the brand and supports the brick and mortar handyman service without continued maintenance. This website concept could be applicable to other small non-scalable businesses to build on their brand while maintaining a professional look.