The context
An independent brokerage: one person, one office, a small number of partner insurers. Two audiences arrive through different doors — the one who walks into the office and decides face to face, and the younger one who searches on a phone before calling.
The site exists for the second. Its job is narrow and measurable: let a stranger decide whether this firm is worth a phone call, and make that call easy to place.
The challenge
The temptation on this kind of project is the inflated brochure: published prices, portfolio statistics, a promise to respond within twenty-four hours. None of that is deliverable by one person — and a visitor who discovers the gap between the promise and the reality does not come back.
The exercise was therefore to write a site at the firm’s real size: complete enough to be found and to answer the questions people ask before calling, honest enough that every sentence survives the first meeting.
Two technical constraints came with it. The typical visitor arrives on a phone, often on mobile data: display speed is not a refinement, it is the condition for them staying. And the firm has nobody to administer a platform: the site had to be able to live for years with no platform upkeep and no vulnerability watch.
What we did
- A fully pre-generated site. The thirty-five pages are produced once, at build time; the server only sends them. There is no database to back up, no engine to keep patched, no attack surface to monitor.
- Structured, typed content, organised as collections rather than hand-written pages, so that adding a policy type or an article does not mean touching the layout.
- No external dependency at display time. The typeface is hosted on the site and the little code that runs in the browser is written by hand rather than borrowed from an animation library. Nothing is fetched from a third party — which is as much a speed question as a visitor-privacy one.
- Structured data page by page, a sitemap and a publication feed, so search engines understand what this firm is, what it covers and where it is.
The outcome
A fast, complete site with no moving parts — which, for a firm with no IT department, is the only kind of site that survives over time.
This project illustrates a position we often defend: on a small organisation’s website, most of the work is not technical. It consists of deciding what the site will not say, and writing the rest so that it stays true on the day the visitor picks up the phone.
Client covered by a confidentiality agreement
