A premium business presenting itself on a template
The work was premium; the site was not. A template-bound Wix build left three things missing at once: insufficient social proof, no SEO architecture, and no owned platform on which a prospect could evaluate, trust or convert.
For a boutique firm competing on craft, a site that looks like everyone else’s is not a neutral starting point — it actively argues against the price.
Four documented phases before anything was designed
Business goal research audited the existing site and the competitive landscape. Two buyer personas were defined with their objections written down. Six competitors were scored into threat tiers, which is where the uncontested opening appeared: nobody in that market was addressing trade partners.
The information architecture that came out of it — ninety-six sections across twenty-two pages — was handed over as a strategy document and an execution-level CSV, so it could be built against rather than interpreted.
- Hub-and-spoke service architectureServices structured so each one has its own depth without fragmenting the site into unrelated pages.
- A first-mover trade partners routeA B2B pathway none of the six scored competitors had built, found by scoring them rather than guessing.
- Structured local SEOA /projects/[service]-[suburb]/ URL pattern, so local intent has a real page to land on instead of a filtered view.
Custom Next.js, because the template was the constraint
The site was rebuilt as a custom Next.js application, which is what gave back full SEO control, performance headroom and the design freedom to express a premium brand rather than approximate one.
Nine integrations went live with it — analytics and search console, tag management, business profile and maps, social, pixel, booking and file upload — alongside a scalable CMS model for projects, blog and testimonials, and a single structured conversion path.
An execution-level information architecture compounds with use rather than ageing. That is the asset here, more than any individual page.
Live, generating qualified local enquiries — and too early for a traffic claim
The site launched, runs smoothly and is generating qualified local enquiries, and the engagement has moved into active growth and optimisation.
No traffic, ranking or conversion-rate figures are asserted here. The build is early in its lifecycle, and numbers quoted this soon after launch are noise dressed up as evidence.
