Project Overview

WTS Plumbing and Heating are Surrey and South Londons leading plumbing and heating company, based in Ockley, near to me in Dorking, UK. They offer commercial and domestic plumbing, heating, and other building services to customers in Surrey and South London.

WTS approached me looking for a new website, wanting to improve their poor search engine visibility, as well as low user engagement.

Key Challenges

• Search engine visibility: Search engine optimisation is a key concern for this project.
• Make them stand out: Getting people on to the website is one thing. Getting them stay long enough to make contact is another thing entirely.
• Limited content: Make the most of limited media, and design a website which will take full advantage of what is available.
• Keep whats working: Identify and hold on to the good parts of the existing website, throw the rest out.
• Future plans: WTS intend to expand their web presence in the near future, so this system must be built with that in mind.

Solution

This job started like all projects, getting to know my customers business, what services they provide, and what they need from me.

With this information, I can then work closely with them to design a system which will not only do the job that they are currently looking for, but will also be built with future growth in mind.

• Search engine optimisation: Built with performance on search engines in mind.
• Content generation: The custom CMS makes it easy to add new domain specific content which will automatically be used across the website.
• Specific landing pages: For each service and location, we have a landing page which pulls in related content from other services and locations.

Technical Implementation

• Decoupled front end: Single page web application with server side rendering, built on Vue.js
• RESTful API: Performant RESTful API written in Elixir on Phoenix Framework. Will allow for future apps and websites to consume WTS data.
• Infrastructure: Deployed with Docker, orchestrated with Docker Swarm, nginx reverse proxy. Postgres as the primary data store.

Results

• High end, fast, and performant website showcasing WTS’ capabilities.
• good search engine visibility.
• clear navigation, with quick access to key content.
• clean, good looking, mobile-first responsive layout.
• happy customer.

Thoughts and feelings

It has been great working with WTS Plumbing and Heating. The website looks great, and performs well. I look forward to seeing it climb search engine rankings as we continue to work on this together.