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!
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
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.
What the client said...
"It’s impossible to overstate just how impressive has been the effort from joom.team in taking a
sprawling, disorganised, and ramshackle caterpillar of a site that had accumulated over two decades, and
metamorphosing it into the amazing, wellstructured, visually delightful and stunningly functional
butterfly of a site that it is today.
I doubt anyone other than myself, as sole developer and creator of the pavingexpert website, had any
real understanding of the true scale, coverage and extent of the hundreds and hundreds of pages added to
the site since its first incarnation in 1998. Corralling all that content had previously proven to be a
task too much for other web developers. I’d spent two years and wasted thousands of pounds on developers
that couldn’t cope with the scale of the task before I found joom.team. At last! Someone able to
propose a viable plan, explain how the work would be undertaken, provide the pool of talent necessary
for such a large re-development, and then carry out the entire project with a level of competence and
professionalism that I’d begun to believe couldn’t possibly exist.
joom.team rose to and conquered every challenge, they dealt with every problem, large, small, and
unforeseen, and they did the impossible - turning the untameable, nebulous sprawl of an ever-growing
website into a manageable and simplified thing of wonder. Their analysts created the outline plan, they
appointed a full-time personal project manager to oversee the whole task and then they used in-house
talent to develop the look, style and feel. From the outset, they relied on their own SEO specialist to
ensure the site would perform for the essential search engines, and, once the new site went live, the
SEO team monitored it all for the first month, making every necessary modification, adjustment and tweak
to deliver the ideal website.
Running my own business means I always put in a minimum of 100% and I expect nothing less when I employ
external contractors. I regard myself as a ‘difficult customer’ with firm ideas and high expectations.
And as such, I have no hesitation in commending joom.team in the highest possible terms. They
delivered."
Tony McCormack, Owner
AJ McCormack & Son
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.