LIGHTNING
WEBSITES · PORTALS · ONLINE ENQUIRIES

Show the quality of your work. Make the next step clear.

Show customers what you do, why they should choose you and how to take the next step. We build websites, portals and enquiry journeys around that decision, then connect the information to the people and systems that need it.

Nothing is broken. Nothing converts either.

People call this needing a refresh. It is rarely about looks and almost never fixed by a new theme.

01

Good traffic, wrong enquiries

Search brings people in. Nothing on the page qualifies them, so the inbox fills with work outside your patch, your price band or your remit, and the right jobs never land.

02

Callers ask what the page should answer

Coverage, lead times, price bands, what happens after someone enquires. Staff repeat the same handful of answers every day because the site buried them or never wrote them.

03

It falls apart on a phone

Slow first paint on mobile data, layout shifting as images arrive late, tap targets crowded together and an enquiry form that asks for everything before it will submit anything.

A printed site map marked up in pen beside a laptop showing a page template and a list of old URLs with their redirects.
A website layout being reviewed on screen alongside a phone

No black boxes. No hostage hosting.

Work starts on a copy of your live site, never the live one. You get the staging URL as soon as that copy is running and can watch pages change as they change. The build stays on standard WordPress or plain templates your own developer can read, hosting stays in your name and the domain, analytics and repository keep your logins on them, not ours.

Scope is decided after we crawl the site and read the analytics, not before. Sometimes the answer is three templates and a better form, and we will say so rather than sell a rebuild. When a full rebuild is right, we say which URLs get redirected, which content dies and how search performance gets watched after cutover, so a drop can be traced to a URL rather than argued about.

Crawl. Prototype. Migrate. Then measure.

01

Crawl and content audit

We crawl every URL and pull up to twelve months of search and analytics data where that history exists. Then we mark which pages earn attention, which cannibalise each other and which should be redirected away.

02

Wireframe and words first

Page types, field structure and the actual copy are agreed on a flat wireframe before any visual design, so the argument happens about the message and not the button colour.

03

Built on staging, tested on devices

Templates built and reviewed on a staging URL, then checked on real handsets and driven by keyboard and screen reader before anything is pointed at your live domain.

04

Cutover with redirects mapped

Every old URL mapped to its replacement, or to the nearest page that still answers the same question, with redirects tested before DNS moves. Analytics and Search Console are re-verified as soon as the domain settles, so rankings and form volume can be traced back against the redirect map rather than argued about.

Before you start. Practical questions, answered.

What to consider when deciding whether this work is right for your business.

01

Can our WooCommerce checkout put paid orders into Xero without anyone rekeying them?

Yes. WooCommerce raises an event the moment an order is paid, and that event carries what Xero needs for a sales invoice: customer, line items, tax rate and payment reference. The link runs on that trigger rather than on an overnight file, so a refund lands against the same invoice instead of arriving as a second one. How systems get connected

02

Our team retypes every online order onto a delivery note by hand. Can that stop?

Usually. The delivery note is generated from the order record itself, so the address, the item lines and the customer reference come from one place and print when the order is marked for dispatch. Nobody copies anything across, and a change to the order changes the note without anyone remembering to.

03

Our WordPress contact form goes to an inbox nobody owns. How do we stop losing enquiries?

Often the form is failing before the inbox even gets a chance. Mail sent straight from a web server gets filtered, so every submission is written to a record on the site as it arrives, and the enquiry still exists when the email does not land. The inbox stops being the only copy.

04

Customers ring us all day asking where their order is. Can the site answer that?

Yes, if the status already exists somewhere. A signed-in page shows the customer the same status field your warehouse or courier already updates, tied to their order reference. It answers nothing new. It stops the answer being locked inside a system only your staff can log into, which is what generates the call.

05

We already pay for Shopify. Would you replace it with something built for us?

Probably not. Shopify handles the checkout, tax and payments, and rebuilding that rarely repays the effort, so use the product you already pay for. The work is around it: the pages that earn the search traffic, the order flow into your back office, and the account area where a customer looks something up.

06

We are a public body. Can you meet the accessibility regulations on our website?

No. Nobody can promise a permanent pass, because most failures arrive with content published after launch rather than with the build. The templates are built to WCAG and the publishing step carries a check, so a missing alt text or an unlabelled form field is flagged before that page goes live. Work with public bodies

WORKING EXAMPLESWebsites built for businesses we own and run
WRITTEN SCOPEDeliverables and price agreed before work begins
DIRECT CONTACTA named person responsible for your project
CLEAR HANDOVERAccounts, access, documentation and support agreed up front

It loads on a bad signal. It answers the question before anyone reaches for the phone. It takes the order at eleven at night when nobody is in the office. Build the site to win the work.

Start with the change you want to make.

Send your website address and tell us what you want it to do better. We will explain what we need to assess and how we would scope the work.

Talk to Lightning