The Clague name has been synonymous with conservation architecture in the South East for generations and James Clague is a relatively new practice, built on the same principles. With an emphasis on period and listed buildings, the practice undertakes conservation work of historical homes, alterations, extensions and repurposing of agricultural/industrial buildings.
Despite having a clear distinction from other practices, the original website failed to communicate this identity and raison d'etre. As such, the website was competing to rank for very generic, architectural search terms and phrases, rather than capitalising upon lower hanging fruit which married better with the actual work/services that the firm provided.
The original website was built in Wordpress, which despite being designed to be a 'simple' blogging platform, provides a very cluttered and uninviting interface. The original agency had 'locked down' much of the backend to make it easier and more fool-proof, but that resulted in a website with limited scope for design and layout changes.
We were tasked to design a clean and stylish website that is smart, professional and sympathetically presents the client's portfolio of work.
The website needed to include a dynamically updated homepage that features the latest work and news/blog articles. The blog is largely a means to add content that will help the website to rank and thereby drive traffic. Blogs will be relatively short and sweet, therefore the design needed to make relatively small articles look sufficiently weighty and not too thin on the ground.
The website will be updated by various members of staff that are not necessarily very 'techie' and therefore needed to be easy to use, manage and keep updated.
As a relatively new business, good SEO is crucial to getting traffic to the site, backed up by lots of clear call to actions to generate leads.
Our bespoke CMS proved to be the best platform for the new website, as we could create a simple, intuitive and completely custom 'content management system' to update both the portfolio articles and blog articles. Unlike Wordpress, which is limited to static pages or blog posts, our CMS gives us the ability to create drag and drop editors for each type and format of content, where any member of staff can literally fill in the blanks to create new content.
With a creative design that is reflective of the work that the practice undertakes, the site is welcoming, easy to navigate and provides an excellent user experience, guiding visitors from the homepage or landing pages to the highly visual portfolio pieces with clear call to actions.
A carefully researched and planned keyword strategy is employed across the site in order to rank for a number of keywords and phrases, with an orchestrated content strategy to compliment and reinforce with a series of blog and portfolio articles.
Well optimised images across the site, coupled with super-fast Amazon hosting, ensures that the site is swift to load and responsive across all devices.
454% Increase in Organic Traffic, YOY - Good SEO, Keyword Research & Strategy
Increased Staff Engagement - Ease of use
3x Faster Loading - Lightweight design, well optimised, fast hosting, no plugins
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