Web Design for Headway Education Partners — Education Consultancy, West Midlands

What was the project, in short?

Headway Education Partners is a SEND and inclusion consultancy working with schools, multi-academy trusts, local authorities and partnerships. We designed and built the website from scratch, wrote the copy, produced the legal pages, moved the domain onto Cloudflare and handed over a brand pack.

What was actually wrong before we started?

There was nothing there at all. Headway was a three-week-old company with a logo and a LinkedIn profile, and every enquiry was arriving through personal contacts.

That is a specific problem rather than a general one. Faye's buyers are headteachers, SENCOs, directors of education and multi-academy trust chief executives. They check people before they commission them, usually on a phone between meetings. Without a website, a trust chief executive who had heard her name had no way to see what she did, who she had worked with, or how to start a conversation. The reputation existed; the place to point people did not.

Three further constraints shaped the build:

• Her Google Workspace email was live and in daily use. The domain was registered at Namecheap with a single Google MX record, and any DNS work had to happen without interrupting it.
• The autumn term matters. Schools and trusts plan their SEND support for the year ahead in September, so being findable in October is worth considerably more than being findable in January.
• She wanted room to grow. Early copy positioned her as a sole adviser, which she asked us to change so that the site would still be accurate when she brings in associates.

Why we built a homepage before asking for any money

We built the full homepage first, live and clickable, before invoicing anything. Most agencies present a mood board and ask for a deposit; we would rather be judged on the real thing.

It changed the conversation. Instead of approving a concept in the abstract, Faye responded to an actual page with actual words on it, which produced far better feedback than a wireframe ever does. Her first round of comments reshaped the positioning, the six service descriptions and the problem-led section, all before a line of the rest of the site existed.

• Two hero options built and shown live so she could choose between a portrait-led and a setting-led opening
• Six service areas written from her own LinkedIn profile and corrected by her
• A problem-led section where each of six real questions a leader would ask links straight to the service that answers it
• Her own logo drove the design — the rising curve inside the H shapes the hero, the service cards and the three-stage section that draws itself as you scroll

Why we built it in hand-coded HTML rather than WordPress

Because it is faster, there is nothing to maintain, and there is no login for anyone to attack. The site is static HTML and CSS served from Cloudflare's network, and it loads in under a second.

We built on WordPress for years and still will if a client genuinely wants a dashboard. For a six-page consultancy site it is the wrong tool: plugins to update, a database to secure, and a page builder that adds weight to every page. Faye was never going to log in twice a year to change a paragraph, so we took that job on instead and made the pages quicker as a result.

• No database, no plugins, no version updates, no maintenance window
• All images converted to WebP and compressed — the whole site is under 1MB including photography
• Security headers, HSTS, SSL and long-lived immutable caching on assets set at the edge
• Content changes come to us by email and go live, usually within 48 hours

How we wrote copy for a buyer who reads on a phone between meetings

We wrote the site around the problems leaders actually describe, not the services Faye sells. The homepage opens with six questions in a school leader's own words, each linking to the relevant service.

Two examples, both supplied by Faye and left in her phrasing: “Our SENCO is good at what they do, but the role keeps getting bigger” and “We're doing lots for inclusion, but we're not sure it's making enough difference.” A headteacher recognises themselves in those sentences far more readily than in a list headed Services.

• Eleven named testimonials, including a multi-academy trust chief executive and two directors of education, published verbatim with only spelling and grammar corrected
• Three legal pages written for an education consultancy specifically, including an explicit request that nobody sends personal information about a child through the contact form
• A full About page covering twenty-five years across primary, secondary, alternative provision, local authority, partnership and trust settings

How we moved the domain to Cloudflare without breaking her email

We copied every mail record into Cloudflare and verified it before changing a single nameserver. Her email never went down.

The domain was at Namecheap with a Google Workspace mailbox in daily use. The order matters: audit and screenshot the existing DNS, rebuild it in Cloudflare, check it line by line, and only then change the nameservers. Do it the other way round and there is a window where the new nameservers are authoritative and hold no MX record, which bounces mail.

• Existing records exported: a single Google MX record, DKIM, and two Google site-verification records
• Two records were missing entirely — there was no SPF and no DMARC on the domain, which we added
• Every mail record left unproxied, because Cloudflare must never sit in front of mail
• Nameservers switched only once the Cloudflare zone matched the export exactly, then mail tested in both directions

How we structured the search foundations for the West Midlands

We built the technical foundations properly and deliberately did not build location pages yet. For a brand-new domain with six pages, the honest priority was making sure nothing on our side held the site back.

Faye's work is not geographically bounded in the way a trade is. She works with schools and trusts across Birmingham, Solihull, Sutton Coldfield and the wider West Midlands, and on national projects including NHS and Combined Authority work, so a page per town would have been invented volume rather than real intent. The copy names the places the work genuinely happens and the site is structured so that sector and location pages can be added later without rebuilding anything.

An honest note on rankings: we do not promise positions and nobody credible can. A three-week-old domain has no history and Google takes time to trust it. What we can say is that the technical work is done, the pages are structured correctly, and nothing on the site's side is holding it back.

• Unique title tag and meta description on all six pages, within search-result lengths
• One H1 per page and no skipped heading levels, verified by an automated check on every build
• Structured data: ProfessionalService on the homepage carrying the registered address and service catalogue, Person on the about page, FAQPage on the contact page
• XML sitemap and robots.txt generated, submitted through Google Search Console
• Canonical URLs, Open Graph and Twitter cards, and a 1200 × 630 social image so shared links render properly on LinkedIn
• Clean URL redirects for /about and /contact, and www pointed to the apex domain

How does an enquiry actually reach Faye?

Every button on the site opens one form, and every submission lands directly in her inbox tagged with the page it came from. There is no portal, no CRM and nothing to log into.

For a consultancy this suits the way work is actually won. A director of education is not going to fill in a twelve-field form; they want to describe a problem and get a person. So the form asks for name, role, organisation, email, phone, which service it concerns and a short description of what is going on — and the service field pre-fills when the enquiry starts from a specific service card.

• One form, reachable from the navigation, every service card, the mobile menu and the contact page
• Submissions tagged by source page so Faye can see what is driving enquiries
• Reply-to set to the sender, so hitting reply in Gmail goes straight back to them
• An honest promise stated on the page: a reply within two working days, and a straight answer if someone else is a better fit
• A newsletter opt-in, unticked by default, so a mailing list can be built with real consent behind it

What nearly went wrong, and how we caught it

Two things, and both were ours. The more serious one was an image bug that would have shipped a visibly broken hero.

Our image cropping script had its two branches the wrong way round. When a source photograph was taller than the target ratio it asked for a crop area wider than the image itself, and the software filled the overflow with black. Every image on the site had roughly 185 pixels of black bar down each side, which under the navy hero gradient looked like a dark band at the edge of the screen rather than an obvious fault. It took three rounds of looking at it before we stopped adjusting CSS and measured the actual pixels.

The second was a class-name collision: the services menu and the problem-led tabs both used the same CSS class name, so the navigation styling was hiding an entire section of the homepage.

The fix was not just the fix. We wrote a build check that now runs before every hand-off and fails outright on any of these, so the same mistakes cannot reach a client again:

• Samples the outer pixel rows and columns of every image and fails on a black edge
• Counts H1 tags and flags any skipped heading level
• Verifies every internal link and anchor resolves, and every image has alt text
• Parses the JSON-LD, checks canonicals exist and that no page still carries noindex
• Measures white-text contrast across the button gradient and fails below 4.5:1
• Flags duplicate IDs, which is how we caught a document that had accidentally been spliced onto itself

What does the business have now?

A six-page website, live on its own domain, that a trust chief executive can be pointed at with confidence.

Three weeks from the first concept to live, including two full rounds of client feedback and a domain migration.

• A homepage that opens with the problems leaders describe, and routes to six clearly written service areas
• Eleven named testimonials, including a multi-academy trust chief executive, two directors of education, a SENCO and an educational psychologist
• A full About page that evidences twenty-five years in and across schools, trusts and the wider system
• Privacy, cookie and terms pages written for the data an education consultancy actually handles
• Enquiries arriving in her inbox, tagged by source, with a two working day response promise
• Email authentication properly configured: SPF and DMARC added where none existed, and DKIM set up
• A brand guidelines document and asset pack, so flyers and banners produced by anyone else will match the site

Thinking about a website for your consultancy?

Tell us what you need and we will give you a straight price. If we are not the right fit, we will say so.

See our pricing, or tell us about your project. We will tell you honestly whether you need a new site or just a tidy-up.

Message us on WhatsApp — 07725 541812.

Web design for consultants: /web-design-for-consultants/

See our pricing, or tell us about your project. We will tell you honestly whether you need a new site or just a tidy-up.

Message us on WhatsApp — 07725 541812.

07725 541812

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