Case Study
A $500K Home Deserves More
Than a $34 Website Score
How TKG Custom Homes finally got a digital presence that matches their craftsmanship.
34 → 80
Site Score
181%
Traffic Increase
100/100
Mobile Score
< ½
The Build Cost
01
The Homes Were Never the Problem
Steve Turner builds custom homes in the Texas Hill Country — half-million-dollar homes on acreage in communities like Twin Creeks and the rolling land between Seguin and New Braunfels. Homes with hand-selected stone, custom millwork, and the kind of attention to detail that makes people stop their cars on the road and stare.
But when those same people went to tkgcustomhomes.com, they found something else entirely. A generic template. Slow to load. Hard to navigate on a phone. No real sense of who TKG was or what made their work different.
The old site scored 34 out of 100 on a comprehensive technical audit. That’s not a website — that’s a liability.
02
What ~$10,000 Got Them
The previous vendor charged TKG roughly $10,000 to build that site. Ten thousand dollars for a template that scored in the bottom third of the web. No SEO strategy. No mobile optimization worth mentioning. No structured data. No performance tuning. Just a template with some photos dropped in and a logo slapped on top.
Steve didn’t know the score was 34. He just knew something was wrong. Homebuyers would visit the site and the experience didn’t match what they saw when they visited a TKG home in person. The craftsmanship stopped at the browser window.
For a builder whose entire business depends on trust — on a buyer believing you’ll deliver a half-million-dollar product — that gap between reality and website was costing real money.
03
How We Got There
Most agencies would’ve sent a questionnaire, picked a template, and called it done. That’s exactly what happened the first time — and why TKG ended up with a $34 site.
RJ Digital doesn’t work that way.
We started by listening. Not a kickoff call with a slide deck — real conversations. Multiple sit-downs with Coy Turner and the TKG team about how they actually build homes. How they talk to clients. What questions buyers ask first. What makes a TKG home different from every other builder advertising in the Hill Country.
What we found was a story nobody was telling. TKG doesn’t build from a catalog of plans. Every home starts from a blank page. “We build homes, not houses” isn’t a tagline. It’s how Steve has operated since 2012. But the old website made TKG look exactly like every other builder. The thing that made them special was invisible.
We shaped the site around their voice. The process page reads the way Coy actually explains the build to a client sitting across the table. The gallery is organized by what buyers care about — kitchens, elevations, outdoor living — not by subdivision name.
“After many discussions, he showed us OUR website. The website we’d always wanted. The verbiage, our promise, the process — everything we try to convey about building custom homes was right there on the screen. Like it came from our mouth. (I guess it did.)”
04
The Rebuild
RJ Digital rebuilt tkgcustomhomes.com from scratch. Not a template. Not a page builder. Hand-coded in Next.js, optimized for speed, designed to reflect the quality TKG actually delivers.
Photography-First Design
TKG's work speaks for itself — the site gets out of the way and lets the homes sell. Full-width galleries, detail shots of craftsmanship, and a layout that feels premium without feeling heavy.
Mobile-Perfect
100/100 mobile score. Every page, every image, every interaction — built for the phone in someone's pocket while they're driving through Hill Country looking at land.
SEO That Actually Works
From meta descriptions to structured data to content strategy — the site is built to be found, not just to exist. Core SEO score: 93/100.
A Real Process Page
Homebuyers considering a custom build have questions. The process page walks them through exactly how TKG works — from first conversation to handing over the keys.
Performance That Loads
85/100 performance score. No bloated plugins, no render-blocking scripts, no waiting five seconds for a hero image to appear.
05
The Numbers
The old site vs. the new site, measured by the same audit tool.
Traffic
124
Jan (old site)
349
Feb (new site)
181% increase in active users
Cost Comparison
Old vendor
~$10,000
build + $4,000/mo — unresponsive
RJ Digital
$4,500
build + $2,500/mo — picks up the phone
What the Client Said
RJ Digital is everything we’ve been looking for — and then some. Since starting our custom home company in 2012, we’ve been searching for someone who can design our website, communicate well, and keep things up to date for a reasonable price. We worked with many companies and redesigned many websites, but we were never happy with the end product or our communication with the developers.
That is, until we met Ryan Johnson with RJ Digital. He has a hands-on approach, and his goal isn’t just to make sure you’re satisfied — it’s to design something he’s truly proud of. Any change we need is a quick email or phone call. Adding photos is a breeze. And here’s something unheard of — if Ryan thinks of a cool new idea for the website, he just implements it. He’s not scared to work, innovate, or improve.
He’s also a genius when it comes to Google Ads, SEO, and AI. He’s a no-brainer. Work with the guy who does good work, follows up, and can take care of all your website and marketing needs — turnkey.
The Real Point
TKG Custom Homes builds extraordinary things. They always have. The website was the only part of their business that didn’t reflect that.
Now it does.
If you’re a builder, contractor, or service business in the Hill Country and your website doesn’t match the quality of your work — you already know something’s wrong. You feel it every time you send a prospect to your site. You feel it when a competitor with worse work but a better website wins the job.
That gap has a cost. And it’s fixable.
Stop letting a bad website devalue your craftsmanship.
Free audit. Honest assessment. See what your site actually scores.