The brief, the decisions and the delivery
A family business, brought closer to its customers
The challenge
Graham and Matthew's father-and-son business has years of fireplace expertise, but its website needed to communicate a more personal way of working. With consultations now taking place in customers' homes, the site had to explain the service, make a substantial range of fires and surrounds easier to explore, and give local customers confidence in the people doing the installation. The brief combined a complete design refresh with a more useful content structure and an editable WordPress foundation.
Design around the people and the service
We gave the business a warmer, more considered presentation, using fireplace photography, clear typography and its existing red-and-gold identity. Dedicated About and How We Work pages introduce the father-and-son team and explain the in-home consultation model. The primary journey leads to a survey and conversation, rather than directing customers to a showroom or an online checkout.
Turn a large range into a useful catalogue
The rebuild organises 249 appliances and surrounds into nine main ranges, with brand pages, product imagery, recommendations and supporting buying information. Visitors can compare the types of fire or fireplace that suit their home before enquiring. This is an enquiry-led catalogue, not an ecommerce shop: the installation and final specification depend on the customer's property and a site survey.
Make the work visible
Installation photography and films give visitors a closer look at the finished work, materials and flame effects. We built an Our Work gallery, a video collection and accessible viewing controls, alongside service and advice pages. The design brings together supplier product material and genuine installation content without making visitors work through an unstructured collection of files.
Build local relevance into the structure
Nine dedicated town pages explain the service across Reading and the surrounding area, supported by a coverage map, service pages, FAQs and helpful guides. The WordPress and ACF build gives the team structured control over content, products, brands and locations. Page titles, descriptions, canonical URLs and service-area structured data were considered alongside navigation and internal links.
Carry the old website forward carefully
The migration included a mapped legacy URL plan, appropriate redirects and genuine missing-page responses. The launch checks covered 61 sitemap pages and 290 migration cases. The earlier SEO audit supplied a concrete starting point for metadata, image descriptions and internal-link improvements; these are technical delivery checks, not a promise of search rankings or a claim that every submitted page is indexed.
Keep a media-rich website responsive
Responsive WebP images, selective loading of video, locally served assets and a focused Alpine.js layer support the visual experience. The rebuild was checked on desktop and mobile, including navigation, product and video galleries, the coverage map and enquiry-form states. Recorded launch-day homepage Lighthouse samples scored 99 for mobile performance and 100 for desktop performance.
The website, before and after
Before
Original / 22 Oct 2026
After
Rebuild / 29 Oct 2026
What we delivered
- Complete website redesign and custom WordPress/ACF rebuild
- Structured catalogue for nine main product ranges, brands and recommendations
- Installation photography galleries and controlled video playback
- Dedicated service, advice and nine local-area pages with a coverage map
- Father-and-son team presentation and a clear in-home consultation journey
- Responsive enquiry form with photo-upload support
- Page metadata, service-area structured data, internal links and migration redirects
- Optimised media, performance checks and desktop/mobile interaction testing
The outcome
The rebuilt website gives Berkshire Fireplace Centre a clearer online home for both its products and its personal service. Visitors can explore the ranges, see real installation work, understand the process and enquire about their own home. The 22 October launch audit recorded 61 reachable sitemap pages with unique titles and descriptions, while the dated lab measurements below document the delivered homepage performance. The comparison viewer preserves the original site's appearance alongside the redesign.
From SEO audit to rebuild
- Content structure
Audit / 27 Aug 2026
21 sitemap URLs, including two empty responses and an author URL that repeated the homepage.
Launch / 22 Oct 2026
61 sitemap pages returned successfully, with every page reachable within two static-link steps in the launch crawl.
- Page metadata
Audit / 27 Aug 2026
8 of 18 real pages had no meta description, and the homepage and installation page shared the same title.
Launch / 22 Oct 2026
The 61-page launch crawl found unique titles and descriptions, self-referencing canonicals and no structural heading failures.
- Images and migration
Audit / 27 Aug 2026
112 of 393 images lacked alt text. More than 230 product-image links led to malformed URLs.
Launch / 22 Oct 2026
Rendered checks found no missing visible alt attributes on tested pages. The legacy migration suite passed 290 redirect, response and image-link cases.
- Local journeys
Audit / 27 Aug 2026
The two existing location pages had no internal links pointing to them.
Launch / 22 Oct 2026
Nine dedicated town pages, a coverage map and clear service/navigation links make local information part of the main customer journey.
These are dated crawl and implementation findings from different-sized sites, not a like-for-like ranking or organic-traffic comparison. The original audit did not establish a reliable Lighthouse baseline, so no percentage speed improvement is claimed.
Recorded launch-day lab results
- Desktop performance
- 100/100
- Mobile performance
- 99/100
- Desktop LCP
- 0.4 s
- Mobile LCP
- 2.2 s
Performance figures are individual Lighthouse 13.4.1 homepage lab measurements of the public website recorded on 22 October 2026. They are not current live scores, field Core Web Vitals or guarantees for every device. The 61-page count is the launch sitemap/crawl inventory, not a Google indexing total. Historical SEO observations come from the 27 August audit. No verified before-and-after organic clicks, impressions, rankings, enquiries or revenue increase is claimed. The visual comparison uses original 22 October captures and redesigned 29 October captures.
What this means for your project
A local service website should help people understand what you do, see the quality of the work and take the right next step. A well-organised catalogue, useful local pages and an honest introduction to the team can do that together. Plan the content, editing experience, technical SEO and migration as part of the design, rather than treating them as finishing touches.
Case study updated ·
People we've worked with
Real projects, built together
Let’s Grow Your Business Together
Tell us about your project and we’ll show you exactly how we’d grow your business. Book a free 30-minute discovery call, no pressure.