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“We spent a lot of time thinking about our audience”, says Josh Groves, President of a new home improvement-based website called jobtrio.com based out of Santa Barbara, California. “Contractors tend to be self-sufficient and frugal. The modern home owner likes to make informed decisions before they spend their money, and they get most of their information off the Internet. On the Net, they now expect their smallest, most specific interests to be attended to. Our site is a bridge between these two groups of people.”

Simply put, jobtrio.com is a free, easy to use tool for locating home improvement specialists. The site features candid customer reviews and in-depth profiles so that you can find the contractor who exactly matches your needs, whether you’re building your dream home, or just trying to find a great gardener. A user can browse over 250,000 listings of California contractors, or quickly search for a business by name, location, and specialty. Home improvement specialists pay a small monthly fee to upgrade their basic, free listing to a detailed webpage with write-ups, photos, and employee contact information.

“One of the biggest challenges was packaging technology in a way that doesn’t alienate our customers,” says Brett Vernon, CEO of jobtrio.com. “We’re trying to connect contractors with home owners: two groups which traditionally aren’t known for being on the cutting edge of technology.” To create the most intuitive user experience possible, Vernon and Groves selected Louder Design from Pasadena, California to head-up the software efforts, a firm composed of Google and Yahoo veterans. The goal of stream-lined functionality is evident right away when you land on the jobtrio.com homepage. Unnecessary clutter has been removed from the site, and all the tools for finding the right contractor are placed right at your finger tips. In a matter of seconds, you can be flipping through trade-specific profiles of contractors in your area. The system for reviewing contractors is also very straight forward and encourages customer input. Anyone with even just a basic level of Web surfing experience will feel comfortably at home at jobtrio.com.

But, jobtrio.com is not solely aimed at connecting home owners with contractors; it has many features which are clearly intended for use by construction industry professionals. For instance, search results can be sorted by union and non-union labor, and you can quickly look up the cell phone number of a specific employee in a specific department. “Our hope is that we become the top resource on the Internet when it comes to locating home improvement specialists,” says Vernon. “We want contractors to view jobtrio.com as an undeniably valuable asset to their business.”

It seems that Groves and Vernon, both former contractors themselves, have their finger on the pulse of the construction industry. With the recent economic downturn, the smart small business owner will be looking for low-cost, effective marketing like that offered by jobtrio.com. The site officially launched in February of this year, and already the response has been tremendous. As Groves puts it, “The jobtrio.com product sells itself. And that was always our goal: to give contractors a great marketing tool at a fair price.”