Web Design for Ogival Ltd — Building Contractor, Greater London

What was wrong with the old Ogival website?

It was a tired Joomla site that had stopped reflecting the business. Emanuel had spent twenty-five years building in Kensington, Chelsea and Notting Hill, and none of that came across.

• Twenty-eight pages in the navigation, but fifty-seven in the sitemap — most of the site was unreachable from the menu.
• Twenty-four location pages, all for conveyor belt hire, a service the company no longer wanted to offer.
• A dead online shop still sitting on the site, with cart and login pages Google was still crawling.
• No case studies. Twenty-five years of finished work and nothing to show for it.
• Services buried three levels deep, so a homeowner looking for a loft conversion had to guess where to click.
• A near-identical site still live on the old francor.co.uk domain, competing with it in search.

How do you make thirty-one services easy to navigate?

You group them the way a client thinks, not the way a builder lists them. We worked with Emanuel to sort thirty-one services into five groups, then built a mega menu that shows all of them at once.

• Five groups: planning and project management, construction and civils, interiors and finishing, building services, and systems and care.
• A four-column mega menu on desktop, with every service one click from any page.
• A services hub page with all thirty-one as image tiles, grouped, with a sticky jump bar.
• A drawer menu on mobile with the same structure, because more than half of trade enquiries arrive on a phone.
• Every service page built to the same shape: what's included, the types of job, how the work runs stage by stage, what drives the cost, and the questions people actually ask.

How do you show twenty-five years of work that was never photographed properly?

Emanuel had thousands of phone photos and no organised archive. We went through them project by project and built ten case studies from what was there.

• Ten case studies, including a fifteen-metre basement dug beneath a four-storey building in White City and a house in Shepherd's Bush converted into three self-contained flats.
• Drag-to-compare before and after sliders on the projects where we had both shots.
• Every image restored, colour-corrected, cropped and re-encoded — 427 in the finished site.
• A filterable gallery of 42 photographs across seven categories.
• Each case study cross-linked to the service pages it proves, so a basement job appears as evidence on the basement, underpinning and groundworks pages.

How do you brand a builder without it looking like every other builder?

We took Ogival's own navy and green and built a banded design system around them, so the site alternates dark and light as you scroll and never feels like a template.

• Sora for headlines and Plus Jakarta Sans for body text, self-hosted so they load instantly.
• A banded layout — dark, light, tinted, dark — that gives each section its own weight.
• Real photography at full bleed rather than stock imagery of hard hats.
• Their own review platforms shown honestly in the footer band: Google, MyBuilder, TrustATrader, Yell and Houzz, each with the real figure next to it.

What did we get wrong, and how did we catch it?

Two things, both caught before they did damage.

When we mapped the old Joomla URLs into redirects, two rules ended up pointing at themselves — /services to /services. Cloudflare followed the loop until the browser gave up, so one of the most valuable pages on the site returned an error. We now run every old URL through a simulator that follows each redirect hop and flags anything that revisits a URL. It found both in seconds, and that check is now part of every launch we do.

The second was a client confidentiality point. Ogival asked us never to publish a flat or house number. We had removed them from the text, the URLs and the image filenames — but the numbers were still visible in three photographs, painted on a front door and screwed to a stairwell wall. We ran optical character recognition across every image on the site, found them, and edited them out.

How is the site structured to be found in search?

Around the way people actually search for a builder: the service, the service in a place, "near me", and the question they ask before they are ready to call.

The location pages come next. Ogival is based in W10, and Google's own guidance is that local results turn on relevance, distance and prominence. You cannot move the yard, so the work is being relevant in the boroughs closest to it: Notting Hill, Kensal Green and Shepherd's Bush first, then Kensington, Hammersmith, Chelsea and Fulham. Those pages are being written now, one area at a time, each one genuinely about that area rather than a template with the name swapped.

We do not promise rankings. Nobody honest can. What we can do is make sure the site is findable, fast and structured properly in the places the business actually works.

• Every page has a unique title of 30 to 64 characters and a description of 110 to 165, so nothing is truncated in the results.
• Structured data across the site: GeneralContractor and WebSite on all 56 pages, BreadcrumbList on 38, Service on 31 and FAQPage on 32 — all connected to the Google Business Profile.
• An XML sitemap index split into pages, services and projects, so indexing can be tracked per section rather than as one number.
• Forty-five redirect rules covering every URL on the old site, including the orphaned pages nobody knew about.
• Two questions added as real headings on every service page — how much it costs in London, and how long it takes — because those are the two highest-volume searches in this trade.
• An llms.txt file, so AI assistants reading the site get a clean structured summary of all thirty-one services.

How do enquiries actually reach Ogival?

Three ways, because builders answer the phone at different times of day and homeowners have different levels of nerve.

• A call button fixed to the bottom of every mobile page — the single most used route on a trade site.
• "WhatsApp a photo" on every service page, because a photograph of a damp patch answers more questions than a form ever will.
• A quote form on all 56 pages, asking for the postcode and the service so Emanuel can price the visit before he makes it.
• A separate "work with us" band for contractors, trades and suppliers, routed to a different number so partner enquiries never get lost among customer ones.

What does Ogival have now?

Three weeks from first concept to launch, and we are still working with them every month.

• A 56-page website that says clearly who they are, what they build and where they work.
• Thirty-one services, each with its own page, its own photography and its own set of answered questions.
• Ten case studies they are proud to send to a prospective client mid-conversation.
• A mobile site that loads in well under half the weight of the old one, scoring 100 for SEO and 100 for best practices.
• Analytics, Search Console and a Google Business Profile all connected and reporting.
• A monthly plan adding location pages, articles and social content, so the site keeps growing instead of ageing.

Frequently asked questions