Concept build: a website and front desk for a 6-truck HVAC company

Ridgeline Heating & Air is a fictional company, and this is a concept project. We made it up so we could show a complete build without inventing a client or a result.

Everything below is what we would build for a real shop this size. That means the brief, the site, the front desk and the numbers we would watch. It is the same work we describe on our HVAC website design page.

Who is Ridgeline Heating & Air?

Ridgeline is an invented residential HVAC company in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with 6 trucks. It repairs and replaces heating and cooling systems and sells a maintenance plan.

These are the facts we gave ourselves for the brief:

• 6 trucks, 6 techs, one office manager, and an owner who still runs calls.
• Service area: Tulsa, Broken Arrow, Jenks, Bixby, Owasso and Sand Springs.
• Work: residential repair, system replacement, and a maintenance plan with two visits a year.
• Busy seasons: Oklahoma summer heat and winter cold snaps. Spring and fall are slower.
• Office hours: 7:30am to 5pm, Monday to Friday. One tech is on call after hours.

The owner’s problem, as we wrote it in the brief: calls after 5pm go to voicemail. The office spends the first hour of each morning calling people back. By then, some of those callers have booked another shop.

What does an HVAC website have to do?

It has to get a homeowner from “my AC is out” to a booked visit in as few taps as possible. Everything else on the site supports that one job.

For Ridgeline, that came down to this list:

• Tap-to-call at the top of every page. A real phone link, not a picture of a number.
• Show the service area. Name the towns, so a caller in Owasso knows the trucks come to them.
• Name the emergency line. Say who answers after hours and what counts as an emergency.
• Sell the maintenance plan. Show the price, what each visit covers, and a signup form that takes a minute.
• Mention financing. A new system is a big bill. Say plainly that financing exists and link to the terms.
• Show the license and insurance. Put the Oklahoma mechanical license number near the call button, with proof of insurance.
• Load fast on a phone. We assume the visit happens on a phone, in a hot house, on a weak signal.

What did we design for Ridgeline?

We designed a small site with eight pages, and each page has one job. The home page does the most work, so we drew it first.

Page	Its one job
Home	Get the call or the booking. Show the emergency line, towns served and proof.
AC repair	Explain what we fix and what the service call fee is.
Heating repair	Cover furnaces and heat pumps. Put the gas and carbon monoxide safety steps first.
Replacement	Explain the quote visit, the brands installed and financing.
Maintenance plan	Show the price and what each visit checks. Take the signup.
Service area	List every town on one page, with a simple map.
About	Show the owner, the trucks, the license and insurance.
Contact	Phone, hours, a short form and the after-hours line.

We did not build a separate page for each town. Six thin pages that swap the town name would add nothing a homeowner needs.

1. 1
   Call bar

   Two buttons: Call now and Book online. The bar stays at the top while you scroll.

2. 2
   Open status

   Shows if the office is open. After hours, it says the front desk answers and books.

3. 3
   Job and place

   The headline says AC and heating repair in Tulsa. One real photo of a truck, no stock photos.

4. 4
   Three services

   AC repair, heating repair and replacement. Big tap targets, one line each.

5. 5
   Maintenance plan

   The plan price, what the two visits cover, and a Join link.

6. 6
   Proof strip

   License number, proof of insurance, and the Google rating linked to the real reviews.

How would the front desk handle Ridgeline’s calls?

The front desk answers every call and web chat, day or night, with the questions Ridgeline’s office would ask. It books the job into open slots on the calendar and texts a summary to the right person.

Here is one sample call from a January cold snap. The caller and the details are made up.

1. 22:52SystemCall comes in. Office closed. On-call tech is out on another job.
2. 22:52Front deskRidgeline Heating & Air, this is the after-hours line. What is going on?
3. 22:53CallerFurnace is running but blowing cold air. The house is at 58 and dropping.
4. 22:54Front deskAsks about gas smell, CO alarm, and anyone at risk from the cold. No smell, no alarm, two adults, space heater on.
5. 22:55Front deskGets the address in Broken Arrow, a callback number, and the furnace brand.
6. 22:56Front deskOffers Sunday 8-10am, the first open slot. Caller takes it. Confirmation text sent.
7. 22:56SystemJob summary texted to the on-call tech and added to the office calendar.

Booked

Window

Sun 8:00-10:00am

Job

Gas furnace blowing cold air

Town

Broken Arrow

Sent to

On-call tech and calendar

Sample call. Fictional customer and company.

Most calls fall into a few types. For each one, the owner decides in advance what the desk does.

Call type	What the front desk does
No cool	Checks the thermostat and breaker basics. Gets the address and unit age. Books the next open slot. Flags heat risk (infant, elderly person, illness) to the on-call tech.
No heat	Asks the same questions, plus gas smell and CO alarm. Books the first open slot. Flags cold risk to the on-call tech.
Gas smell or CO alarm	Reads the safety script: leave the house now, then call the gas company or 911 from outside. Texts the on-call tech. Does not book or troubleshoot.
Maintenance plan question	Gives the plan price and what each visit covers. Signs the caller up or books the first visit.
New system quote	Asks the age of the home and the system. Books a quote visit with the owner. Gives no price.
Existing customer reschedule	Finds the job on the calendar, offers open slots, moves it and texts the new time.

You can read more about how the AI front desk works, including how booking connects to the calendar.

What does the front desk not do?

It does not diagnose equipment, quote repair prices or promise times it cannot see on the calendar. It answers, asks, books and hands off to a person.

• No diagnosis. “Sounds like a capacitor” is a tech’s call, made with the panel off.
• No repair prices. It gives the service call fee and the plan price, because the owner approved those. Nothing else.
• No pretending. If a caller asks, it says it is an automated assistant for Ridgeline.
• No judgment calls on safety. Gas and CO calls get the script, then go straight to a human.
• No new rules. It books only into windows the office opened, for jobs the office takes.

What would we measure?

We would track calls, bookings and where they came from, and report them on one page each month. We have no results to report, because this company does not exist.

Metric	How we would measure it
Calls answered after hours	Front desk call log, split into office hours and after hours.
Calls that end in a booking	Bookings the front desk created, divided by the calls it answered.
Missed calls	Phone system log of calls that rang out or hung up before an answer.
Calls from the website	Taps on the call link, counted on the site.
Calls from the Google profile	Google’s own call counts in the Business Profile.
Maintenance plan signups	Form and front desk signups, checked against the office billing list.
Page speed on a phone	Lighthouse mobile scores and real-user Core Web Vitals, checked monthly.
Reviews	Review request texts sent after each job, and new Google reviews.

HVAC call volume moves with the weather. A cool July means fewer no-cool calls, and that says nothing about the website. So we would compare each month to the same month a year earlier when we have it, and say when the weather explains the change.

Why build a fictional company?

We do not have client results to show yet, and we will not make any up. A concept build shows how we think about a real shop’s problems, with nothing fake dressed up as proof.

If you run an HVAC company, the brief above probably looks familiar. The parts that change for your shop are the towns, the hours, the on-call rules and the plan. The rest of the build stays the same.