On 15 October I spent the day in Duncan Grindley's office in Burwell and rebuilt both of his companies' websites: Cambridge Electrical Services (opens in a new tab) and its sister business, Cambridge EV Points (opens in a new tab). By the end of the afternoon both new sites were live, with the old ones kept safely in the background in case we ever wanted them back.
Duncan's electrical company has traded from Burwell since 2009, and Cambridge EV Points installs chargers for homes, workplaces and car parks across the area. I built the original websites for both some years ago, and they had served well, but they had begun to show their age. They were not easy for Duncan to change himself, and the electrical site was not appearing as well as it should in searches for electricians in Cambridge, which is precisely the work he wants more of.
Why it was done in a day, and in his office.
Most website projects take longer than they need to because of the back and forth. A question goes by email, the answer comes back a week later, and by then everyone has lost the thread. Sitting in Duncan's office meant that every decision was made there and then: which services he wanted to grow, which photographs showed the work best, what he wanted the pages to say and what he wanted gone. He had his own list of changes written out, and we worked through it together rather than over a fortnight of emails.
What changed on the electrical site.
The new site keeps the feel of the old one, and the new logo Duncan had already had made, but almost everything beneath is new. Each of the services he wants to grow now has a proper page of its own: landlord electrical certificates (opens in a new tab), emergency lighting (opens in a new tab), LED lighting (opens in a new tab) and EV chargers (opens in a new tab). Air conditioning, which the company now supplies and fits, has joined the list of services (opens in a new tab) and the enquiry form too.
There are pages for the different people he works for (opens in a new tab), from homeowners and landlords to businesses and industrial sites. A map shows the towns the company covers, and there are pages for the places he works, beginning with Burwell (opens in a new tab) and Ely (opens in a new tab), where there are real jobs to point to. The projects (opens in a new tab) section shows that work in photographs, so that a visitor can see what the team has actually done rather than take it on trust.
What changed on Cambridge EV Points.
The EV site had a menu of thirteen brand logos in different shapes and sizes, which made it hard to find anything. Now the chargers are arranged the way customers think about them: home charging (opens in a new tab), workplace and public charging (opens in a new tab), and solar panels (opens in a new tab) and batteries (opens in a new tab). Every brand has its own page, written from the maker's current information (Andersen (opens in a new tab), for example), and the enquiry form lists the same brands as the menu, so that nobody is asked about a charger the site does not mention.
Duncan's rating of 4.8 out of 5 from 44 Trustpilot reviews sits directly beneath the headline, where it belongs, and more of the reviews are on the new reviews page (opens in a new tab).
Built so that Duncan can look after it.
Both sites are built with WordPress's own block editor rather than a page builder, so Duncan can change the words, replace photographs and add new jobs himself without worrying about breaking the layout. They are built to load quickly on a phone, and both homepages score 100 out of 100 for accessibility, best practices and SEO in Google's Lighthouse test.
Nothing lost along the way.
What worries people most about a new website is losing the Google rankings the old one had earned. The pages Google already knew about kept their addresses, so links from search results, Facebook and anywhere else carried on working. The switch itself was made with a tool I wrote for the job, which kept an exact copy of the old sites and could put them back with one click, so there was never a moment when Duncan's business was at risk. That same evening both sites were verified in Google Search Console, and Google Analytics went in behind a proper cookie consent banner, so that nothing is tracked until a visitor agrees. That work forms part of how I approach SEO.
What this means for you.
Not every website can be rebuilt in a day, and I would never promise that at the outset. It worked here because I already knew both businesses, the photographs and the content were there to work from, and Duncan gave me a whole day of his time to make decisions on the spot. What it shows is what becomes possible when the person who makes the decisions is in the room with the person doing the work, and that is exactly how I like to work, whether it is a website for a trade or a much larger build.
“Adam built our website over 10 years ago and updates it regularly”Cambridge Electrical ServicesBurwell
You can see the two new sites at cambridge-electrical.co.uk (opens in a new tab) and cambridge-evpoint.co.uk (opens in a new tab), and more of my work in the portfolio. If your own website has begun to show its age, you are welcome to book a 30-minute call, and together we will work out what it needs.