Website migration & redesign

pavingexpert.com

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One of the UK’s leading paving experts approached us to transition their static HTML website to Joomla! CMS, including a visual redesign and reorganisation of content, while preserving historically high SEO rankings. The site consisted of close to 1000 (!) unique subpages – this would be a challenge of our team and of Joomla!

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What did the client want?

After many years of managing a construction company, in 1997 Tony McCormack decided to share his extensive knowledge of paving in the form of a dedicated website.

For the last 23 years, he has written upward of 900 pages of rich, insightful content and achieved great popularity and cult status within the paving industry and community.

In 2019, Tony asked joom.team, to migrate his website to a CMS, redesign the logo/layout and reorganise his mountains of content – without compromising existing SEO rankings.

Our role in the project

We started by discussing the existing site in detail with the client and making a detailed project plan, defining methods/goals for the reorganisation and presentation of content.

We then developed a custom design in line with project goals and implemented a range of interactive elements, including many forms, sliders, widgets and CTA variations.

After some head-scratching, the team found a unique solution to the biggest challenge: setting up an automated process of migrating largely heterogeneous content from a static HTML website into structured Joomla! articles.

We also managed to preserve and improve the site’s already high SEO rankings, favourably impacting traffic and ad revenue.

Project highlights

Content Migration

Advanced automatic scraping techniques were implemented to avoid the manual copy/paste process, increasing speed and efficiency of our team.

Content Editing

We improved the user experience by stretching the capabilities of JCE and adding many out of the box features to enable quicker writing/editing and with shortcodes for custom elements.

Table of Contents

For a better reading UX, we implemented a responsive and dynamic TOC (table of contents) generated automatically on the basis of existing page headers.

SEO

To avoid any negative effects on incoming traffic during the migration we analysed and reproduced critical elements from the original website. We also performed before/after SEO audits to ensure ranking integrity.
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Conclusion

It was a great pleasure to work with an expert and enthusiast like Tony, and transform his static website into a living, breathing Joomla!-based site.

We faced a variety of challenges, and were also able to achieve a secondary goal: one month after launch Tony confirmed an immediate increase in on-site ad revenue and general traffic.

Pavingexpert Logo Project Reference About the client

AJ McCormack & Son is the consulting company behind pavingexpert.com, a hugely influential resource used by 125.000 individual users each month, as well as numerous educational institutions across the UK.