Rebuilding Swiftsure Electrical

The site was getting traffic and doing nothing with it.

Swiftsure Electrical already had a website. People were landing on it, reading it and leaving again without picking up the phone, which is the most expensive kind of website to own because it looks like it is working right up until you check the enquiries.

The site had been put together on Squarespace and had aged into something that no longer matched the standard of the work the business does. For a trade where a customer is deciding whether to let someone into their home, looking dated is not a cosmetic problem.

The previous site, which was collecting visitors rather than enquiries.

The real hold-up was not the website.

They had already tried to fix it themselves. The problem was that the people making the decision could not agree on what it should be, so every attempt stalled somewhere between a first draft and a disagreement, and the old site stayed live by default.

That is more common than most agencies admit. Two capable people with different instincts and no tie-breaker will out-argue each other indefinitely, and the business quietly pays for the delay the whole time.

Bringing us in broke the deadlock. Not because we were the loudest opinion in the room, but because we could say what we recommended and give the reasoning behind it, which turns an argument about taste into a decision about outcomes.

Where the colours and the type came from.

Swiftsure sell to two audiences that barely overlap. A homeowner deciding who to let into the house, and a commercial or public sector buyer checking whether a contractor is credible enough for a rail contract or a Ministry of Defence site. The old palette had drifted with no logic behind it and served neither well.

We anchored the new scheme on a near-black navy, and gave it a single blue accent with white type over the top. Dark is the right base for this kind of work: it makes the accreditation marks read as a row of credentials rather than clip art, and it keeps the site serious without tipping into corporate.

The blue is deliberately reserved. It appears on the things that need calling or clicking and almost nowhere else, so on a page listing over twenty services the eye still lands on the quotation button and the phone number. Every pairing was checked for contrast, which matters when a good share of the audience is reading a phone outdoors.

The typography was rebuilt around hierarchy rather than decoration. Sections are numbered so a visitor always knows where they are on a long page, headings are set tight and confident, and body copy is sized to be read quickly by somebody scanning for whether you cover their postcode.

The new colour scheme, built around contrast and clear actions.

The type system, rebuilt around hierarchy.

Off Squarespace, onto Devigo Studio.

Squarespace is fine until the thing you want is slightly outside what it does, at which point you spend your time working around the platform rather than improving the site. Swiftsure had reached that point.

We moved the whole site onto Devigo Studio with nothing lost along the way. It loads faster, the pages are structured properly for search rather than fighting a template, and the parts that change most often are the parts they can edit themselves without asking us first.

The domain, the content and the site itself stay in their name. Moving platform did not mean handing control to somebody else.

The rebuilt site, running on Devigo Studio.

From 4.3 seconds to half a second.

The old Squarespace site took 4.3 seconds to load. The rebuilt site takes 0.5. That gap is the difference between somebody waiting and somebody leaving, and on a phone it is usually the single change with the biggest effect on how many enquiries a site produces.

The whole project ran from first call to live in a month, on a budget at the lower end of what a bespoke build costs. Swiftsure came in unable to agree on what they wanted and came out with a site that makes the argument for them.