Townsend Joinery has a new website. They're a family-owned joinery in Ballarat making timber windows and doors by hand, and they fit them right across Victoria. There were three reasons for the rebuild, and none of them was "it's been a few years".
The signs changed first
Townsend put up new signage with refreshed branding. Once the signs look one way, a website that looks another way starts to cost you. People see the sign, search the name, and land on something that doesn't match. It makes them wonder whether they've found the right business. So the site now carries the same branding as the signs, and it's brighter and more open than the old one.
The reports told us where to look
Townsend's site is reported on monthly in Insights, our reporting tool. It pulls Google Analytics and Search Console into one plain-English summary. We didn't redesign on a hunch. We made the changes the reports pointed to, and we'll judge the new site against the same reports rather than on how it looks.
That's also why this post has no "enquiries up 40%" figure. The site has only just launched. The honest numbers come in a few months, from the same reports that prompted the work.
WooCommerce was costing more than it earned
The old site ran WooCommerce, the shop plugin for WordPress. The trouble is that a made-to-measure timber window isn't something you add to a cart. Every job starts with a conversation and a quote. But the shop still had to be paid for and looked after: extra plugins and extensions to keep updated, more code loading on every page, and more things that could break or need patching.
So we took it out. Instead of a shop, the new site has a short quote form right on the homepage, with a reply promised within one business day. And the old shop address doesn't become a dead end: anyone following an old link to /shop/ is redirected to the products page.
Still WordPress, minus the weight
Dropping WooCommerce didn't mean dropping WordPress. The site is still on WordPress, so Townsend can still edit pages, add photos to the gallery and post news themselves, without a developer. They've just stopped paying for an online shop they didn't need, and the site is lighter and quicker to load as a result.
That's usually the right call for trades and makers who sell by quote. Keep the content management you'll actually use, drop the parts built for a different kind of business, and let the site do one job well: get the right people asking for a quote. What a website really costs to run →
Paying for parts of your website you don't use?
Web design in Ballarat →