Welcome to the 2025 PSN and Hayward Top 50 Builders issue!
Now, if you’re familiar with our two annual Top 50 awards (Builder and Service), you’ll know that the criteria for being named a Top 50 company is centered around five pillars: revenue, staffing, web presence, industry involvement, and community involvement.
To judge each category as objectively and as thoroughly as possible, we ask for a lot of information. We ask for a company’s revenue numbers sliced and diced in multiple ways; we want to know how companies train and retain their staff along with the benefits offered; we want to see how a company represents themselves in the digital space via their websites and social media; and lastly, we want to learn how a company contributes to the world around them, both through inward efforts to further the industry and outward ones in bettering their communities.
It’s a lot of information to process and parse through, and there are many people to thank in pulling off such an ambitious program:
First and foremost, our Deputy Editor Rebecca Robledo. She is the cornerstone of PSN. Rebecca spends hours poring through the data to look for insights on how the industry is performing now and how it compares to recent years. Without her detail-oriented analytical eye and keen sense of fairness, this program wouldn’t be what it is today.
My gratitude extends, too, to web expert Shawn Thuris, whom we invited to evaluate last year’s Top 50 Service websites and this year’s builders’ sites.
Shawn heads Thuris and Co., a web consultancy firm based in Hayward, Calif. He specializes in helping businesses succeed in the digital landscape, whether that involves web development, productivity software solutions, cloud management, providing custom code, or guidance on marketing and artificial intelligence.
The criteria for judging builder sites differed slightly from service. As before, he measured for performance, accessibility, best web practices, and SEO, but there was a change in emphasis.
“I evaluated builders’ websites according to one central question: How effective is this site, this page, this element, at moving potential customers down the sales funnel? With that in mind, each site was judged on a number of criteria, including: ease and clarity of navigation; a browsable gallery showcasing professional photography; a call to action that will get the customer a reply or call back with the least possible friction; overall usability for phone and tablet users; the quality of written copy; and website performance (i.e. no appreciable waiting for pages, fonts, or images to load),” he says. (Builders who would like more information on their web performance are welcome to contact Shawn by email: shawn@thuris.com.)
I’d also like to thank Graphic Designer Melissa Krochmal. The new look we have in this issue is largely due to her artistic eye for clean page design and creative layouts.
And I am eternally grateful to Hayward for sponsoring the Top 50 Builders program this year. Their support enhances the program greatly.
Congratulations to each of the 50 companies that made this year’s list!