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YD Decorating Services has fifteen years of work behind it, a five-star rating on Google and a strong reputation across Epsom and Surrey. What it didn’t have was a website that did any of that justice. This month I rebuilt it, all 39 pages, and it went live seven days after we started.
Seven days isn’t a target I set for every project, and it isn’t a party trick. It came down to a clear brief, a client who replied quickly and a way of building that doesn’t waste time. Here’s how it went.
Start with what’s actually wrong
On our first call, Daniel was clear about three things. The photos showed too much work in progress, with dust sheets and clutter, and not enough finished rooms. The site didn’t feel as professional as his work, and the homepage no longer matched the rest of the site. And it was slow: he’d seen the red numbers in Google’s PageSpeed Insights himself.
That gave me a short, specific list to fix. A brief like that is worth more than a long document full of “nice to haves”.
Keep everything that already works
A redesign is a chance to throw things away, but a lot of what was there was worth keeping. Daniel’s site already had eight service pages, thirteen local area pages and ten project pages, all of which help him get found by people searching for a decorator nearby.
- Every existing page was rebuilt rather than dropped, so nothing that ranked was lost.
- Two leftover template pages were removed, and a misspelt area page address was corrected.
- Every old address that changed was redirected to the right new page, so nobody hits a dead link.
Let the finished rooms do the selling
Decorating is a visual trade, so the photos mattered more than anything I could write. Finished rooms moved to the front of the site, work-in-progress shots moved deeper into the service pages, and I tidied up the most prominent photos so the room is the thing you actually see.
I also added a before-and-after slider, so visitors can drag across the same room and see the difference for themselves. Every image got proper alt text, which helps both accessibility and search.
Build it to be fast from the start
The new site is built in Astro and served from a global network, rather than a single shared server running a heavy page builder. Images are converted to modern, lightweight formats. The result is a site that loads quickly on a phone, which is where most of Daniel’s enquiries come from.
Why it only took a week
- A short brief: three clear problems, agreed on the first call.
- Content already existed, so the job was improving it, not writing from scratch.
- Quick feedback: Daniel replied the same day, every time.
- One person doing the work, so nothing waited on a hand-off between people.
Most projects take longer than this, usually somewhere between a couple of weeks and three months depending on size and how quickly content comes together. But if your site has a clear problem and you’re ready to move, it doesn’t have to drag on.
If your website isn’t doing your business justice, tell me what’s wrong with it and I’ll tell you honestly what it would take to fix.
