Most sign companies sell a product customers cannot picture. A buyer calls, describes a monument sign or an LED message center in vague terms, waits for a rendering, and then waits again for a quote. Signature Signs & Lighting, a commercial sign company founded in 2017 by Collin Andrews and headquartered at 316 E College Ave in Jacksonville, Illinois, wanted to close that gap. This sign company website case study covers what Elevated Ideas built for them between August 22 and September 22, 2026: a new WordPress website, a custom 3D sign builder with View in AR, an SEO page structure, rebuilt Google Business Profiles, a managed Google Ads program and a CRM that turns every saved design into a lead.
Signature Signs is not a small shop. Alongside the Jacksonville headquarters it runs the New Era Signs branch in Decatur (the company also goes by Signature Sign and Lighting, a New Era Company) and satellite offices in Peoria and Edwardsville. It fabricates in its own Central Illinois shop, installs with its own crews across Central Illinois, uses vetted install partners for projects beyond that, and ships signs nationwide. The portfolio includes work for Target, Starbucks, Wells Fargo, Red Lobster, Domino’s, Caliber Collision, Crumbl, Five Below, Discount Tire, La Quinta, Days Inn and Scooter’s Coffee, plus churches, schools and local businesses. The Jacksonville Google Business Profile holds a 5.0 rating across 26 reviews as of August 28, 2026.
What the company asked for was simple to say and hard to build: a website that matched the quality of the work, that let a customer design a sign before ever picking up the phone, and that actually brought in leads from Google.
The Starting Point
Signature Signs already had a simple placeholder website in place, a quick build that did its job while the company got out of a previous contract. It was never meant to carry a business that installs for national brands. There was no page for each sign type, no page for each city the crews serve, no way for a buyer to see a sign before calling, and no system behind the contact form to make sure a lead was followed up.
What the new site had to do
- Look like the work: real project photos, real brand logos, and a design that matches signs built for Target and Starbucks.
- Let customers design first: a 3D builder so a buyer can size, style and place a sign before the first phone call.
- Rank for every service and every city: one page per sign type and one per market, not one page trying to do everything.
- Turn every visit into a lead: quotes, saved designs and calls landing in one CRM with follow-up behind them.
What We Built
The website
We rebuilt the site on WordPress with a structure designed around how people actually search for signs. The sitemap now holds 45 URLs. There are 11 service pages, one each for monument signs, channel letters, building signs, LED message centers, awnings, interior signs, flag poles, sign lighting, sign repair, sign installation and national signage programs. There are 8 city and area pages for Springfield, Decatur, Jacksonville, Peoria, Bloomington, Champaign and Quincy, plus a Nationwide page for the brands and multi-location clients the company ships to. Around those sit a 38-photo filterable gallery with a lightbox, a reviews page, financing, request a quote, an about page, a dedicated New Era Signs page and a blog.
The design leans into what the company sells. The header carries a glowing, LED-style version of the logo. The homepage runs a realistic dot-matrix LED marquee demo, so a visitor sees an LED message center in motion instead of reading about one. A scrolling strip shows the real logos of the national brands in the portfolio, which does more for trust than any paragraph could.
Most sign searches start on a phone, often from a parking lot or a job site, so every page was built mobile first. The builder, the quote form and the click-to-call phone number all work with a thumb.
Every page also carries the fulfillment message the company wanted in plain words: signs are fabricated in the Central Illinois shop, installed by Signature Signs crews across Central Illinois, installed by vetted partners beyond that, and shipped nationwide. That keeps expectations honest for a church in Quincy and for a franchise buyer three states away.
The 3D sign builder
The centerpiece of the project is a custom 3D sign builder at signaturesigns217.com/sign-builder. It is our own application, written for this client, not a licensed third-party configurator. A customer picks from four sign types, including single pole, double pole and monument. They choose one of six stock LED display kits, from 2 by 6 feet up to 4 by 8 feet, then set the cabinet materials and colors. As they work, the sign updates live in a 3D scene placed over a photographic roadside environment, with real cast shadows on the ground.
Two controls do most of the selling. Day and Night modes flip the scene so the customer can see how an illuminated cabinet and an LED display read after dark, which is the moment most sign buyers care about. The On-Site Mockup mode goes further: it drops the configured sign onto stock scenes (a storefront, a restaurant, a church, a gas station, an office and a school) or onto a photo the customer uploads of their own property. They can drag and resize the sign to fit, then download the mockup as an image to share with a partner, a board or a landlord.
View in AR
The feature customers talk about most is View in AR. When a design is ready, the builder exports it as a true-scale 3D model and opens it in the phone’s native augmented reality viewer. There is no app to download. The customer stands in their own parking lot, points the phone at the spot by the road, and sees the actual sign at its actual size.
On a desktop, the same button shows a QR code, so a buyer who designed the sign at their desk can scan it and walk outside with the phone. For a purchase that often runs through a committee, a church board or a franchise approval, that moment of seeing it in place removes a lot of hesitation.
Every design becomes a lead
A beautiful configurator that does not capture anyone is a toy. So the builder is wired into the sales process from both ends. Save your design emails the customer a link that reopens their exact design on any device, so a buyer can start on a phone and finish on a laptop, or forward it to whoever signs the check. Request a quote sends the full design specification along with the request, so the sales team opens the lead already knowing the sign type, the display kit, the materials and the colors.
Every quote request and every saved design lands in the client’s white-labeled CRM with the complete spec and its source attribution, so the team can see which channel produced it. The customer receives their design link by email, the sales team is notified, and automated follow-up from the CRM keeps the conversation going when a buyer goes quiet. The lead relay on the website includes spam protection and rate limiting, so the sales team spends its time on real people rather than bot submissions.
Built to be found
The old site asked one page to rank for everything. The new one gives every service and every market its own page, so Google can match a search for channel letters in Springfield or an LED sign in Peoria to a page written for exactly that. Structured data runs on every page: LocalBusiness markup for the company, 17 Service schemas, 26 FAQPage schemas and Article schema on the blog.
The blog is where the long tail lives. We built a 24-post content plan from keyword research, covering the questions sign buyers type into Google: church signs, neon sign repair, parking lot light repair, what a business sign costs, wayfinding signage and backlit signs among them. Nine SEO-focused posts are already live, and 12 more are scheduled to publish every two weeks.
Google Business Profile management
For a sign company, the map pack matters as much as the website. We rebuilt all four Google Business Profiles: Jacksonville, Decatur, Peoria and Edwardsville. Each profile now carries 71 to 75 keyword-based services, each with its own written description rather than a template with the city swapped. Every profile got a new business description and its social links, and each one now has 26 posts scheduled for Tuesdays and Thursdays from September 1 through November 26, 2026, all with geotagged photos.
Google Ads
We manage the Google Ads account alongside the site. In August 2026 we restructured it around six service campaigns plus Performance Max, refreshed the ads and set budgets that match how sign buyers search. At cutover on September 22, every landing URL was rebuilt to point at the matching page on the new site, so a click on a monument sign ad lands on the monument sign page rather than a homepage.
Early Results
Elevated Ideas manages the Google Ads account for Signature Signs & Lighting alongside the website, and the campaigns have produced a steady flow of quote requests and calls since the account was restructured in August 2026, while the site’s average position in Google Search has been climbing (Google Ads and Google Search Console, checked September 25, 2026).
The ads side moved first because it could. The Competitor Search and Bulk Search campaigns produce most of the conversions, which is why those two are first in line for more budget as the new site indexes. We will publish the full numbers once the new site has a full quarter behind it.
The organic side needs an honest caveat. The new site went live on September 22, 2026, so at the time of writing it is days old, and the organic story is just starting. The early signals are encouraging. The brand query already sits on page one, and within days of cutover the new service, city and blog URLs were already appearing at positions 3 to 11 for their terms. We will know far more after a full quarter of indexing.
What We Shipped
The Launch Video
To announce the new site, Elevated Ideas produced a 44-second animated launch reel in vertical and landscape formats. It is built entirely from live-site captures and the builder’s own demo, so every frame shows the real product. The reel is on YouTube and scheduled across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Google and Pinterest.
The Signature Signs & Lighting new-site launch reel, produced by Elevated Ideas.
A sign is the one purchase a business has to picture before it can say yes. The builder lets the customer picture it, the CRM makes sure someone answers, and the site and ads make sure they find it in the first place.
Elevated Ideas
What Comes Next
The foundation is live, and the work now shifts to compounding it. The blog keeps publishing every two weeks through the remaining 12 scheduled posts, each one aimed at a real sign-buyer question. The four Google Business Profiles keep posting twice a week through November 26. On the ads side, the account now has clean landing pages and campaigns that are running again, so the next step is scaling the budget toward the campaigns producing the cheapest conversions, starting with Competitor Search and Bulk Search. As Google indexes the 45 new URLs, we will be watching the service and city pages climb and reporting the organic numbers as they mature.
Signature Signs & Lighting
- Headquarters: 316 E College Ave, Jacksonville, IL, with the New Era Signs branch in Decatur and offices in Peoria and Edwardsville
- Phone: (217) 860-0708
- Website: signaturesigns217.com
- 3D Sign Builder: signaturesigns217.com/sign-builder
- Founded: 2017 by Collin Andrews
- Built by Elevated Ideas: WordPress website, 3D sign builder with AR, SEO, Google Business Profiles, Google Ads and CRM automation
Related reading: see how attribution changed the math for a Georgia mover in our moving company marketing case study.
Good To Know
Sign Company Website FAQs
Can a sign company let customers design their own sign online?
Yes. Signature Signs & Lighting in Jacksonville, Illinois lets customers design a sign online at signaturesigns217.com/sign-builder, a custom 3D sign builder Elevated Ideas built in 2026. Customers pick a sign type, one of six LED display kits and cabinet materials, preview it in Day and Night modes or on a photo of their property, then view it at true scale in AR. To build one for your company, book a free marketing audit at elevatedideas.com/free-marketing-audit.
How much does a custom website with a 3D product builder cost?
Elevated Ideas prices a custom website with a 3D product builder by scope, because the cost depends on how many product options, scenes and integrations the builder needs. The Signature Signs & Lighting build included the WordPress site, a 3D sign builder with AR, CRM lead capture and SEO structure. The fastest way to get a real number is a free marketing audit at elevatedideas.com/free-marketing-audit.
What is View in AR on a sign company website?
View in AR on the Signature Signs & Lighting website exports the customer’s configured sign as a true-scale 3D model and opens it in the phone’s native augmented reality viewer, with no app to install. Desktop visitors get a QR code to open it on their phone. Elevated Ideas built the feature so buyers can see the sign in their own lot before they request a quote.
Who builds websites for sign companies in Illinois?
Elevated Ideas, a WordPress web design and marketing agency based in Central Illinois, built the signaturesigns217.com website for Signature Signs & Lighting, including 11 service pages, 8 city and area pages, a 3D sign builder with AR and a blog. It also manages the company’s Google Ads and four Google Business Profiles. Book a free marketing audit at elevatedideas.com/free-marketing-audit.
Does Elevated Ideas build websites for sign companies outside Illinois?
Yes. Elevated Ideas builds WordPress websites, 3D product builders, SEO and Google Ads programs for sign companies anywhere in the United States, and the Signature Signs & Lighting build is the working example. The same builder, CRM lead capture and page structure adapt to any market. Start with a free marketing audit at elevatedideas.com/free-marketing-audit.
Does Elevated Ideas run Google Ads for sign companies?
Yes. Elevated Ideas manages the Google Ads account for Signature Signs & Lighting alongside the website, with service campaigns for sign types like monument signs, channel letters and LED message centers plus Performance Max. Every ad now lands on the matching service page of the new site. Book a free audit at elevatedideas.com/free-marketing-audit.
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Sign company websites • 3D product builders • Google Ads • Google Business Profiles • CRM automation