Structure the website before styling it
A homeowner planning an extension and a commercial client looking for a groundworks contractor arrive with different priorities. One may want to understand how a new space connects to an existing house. The other may be looking for evidence of concrete construction, drainage installation or experience around established buildings.
That range is typical of an Essex building company working across domestic and commercial construction, so the structure needed to make each route clear.
The website has to work for both. Rather than forcing everything through one generic services page, the redesign gives individual areas of the business enough space to be explained properly. It also creates a stronger foundation for search: a focused service page can answer a subject in far more depth than a short paragraph on a homepage.
Develop the copy alongside the page design
One of the easiest mistakes in a redesign is to concentrate entirely on appearance. An impressive layout is built, but nobody has decided what the website needs to say. The gaps are then filled with short sections, repeated statements or generic marketing copy that could belong to almost any company.
For CJC, the content was developed alongside the structure. Each section had a purpose: explain a service, answer a likely question, demonstrate relevant experience or guide the visitor towards the next useful page.
Good SEO copy should not sound as though it was written for a search engine. It should answer the questions someone searching for that service is likely to have, using clear language and a logical hierarchy.
Edit website video for the space it needs to occupy
Naturally, we were not going to build an entire website and ignore video. For the homepage, we produced and edited a short construction sequence designed specifically for the main visual area.
This involved sourcing appropriate footage and shaping it around the website rather than repurposing a traditional corporate film. Website video does not always need interviews, music and a beginning, middle and end. Sometimes its job is simpler: movement behind a headline can establish an industry, atmosphere or sense of scale without distracting from the information placed over it.
For companies that already have footage, there may be an opportunity to adapt it for this kind of use. Businesses starting from scratch can plan website assets as part of a wider corporate video production shoot.
Plan one production day around several uses
A business might traditionally book a production company because it wants one video. That can work, but it may leave a large amount of useful content uncaptured or unused.
If a crew is already on location with cameras, lighting and professional audio, the same production day may be able to create material for:
- a main corporate film and website header footage;
- individual service pages and customer testimonials;
- social media videos, vertical clips and future advertisements;
- recruitment content, photography and case studies.
The cost of filming does not necessarily increase dramatically because the footage has more than one purpose. The difference comes from planning those purposes before production begins. The CJC project allowed us to consider video as part of the website from the outset, rather than deciding where to place it afterwards.
Turn project knowledge into useful blog content
The project continued beyond the core pages. We have also been developing blog content for CJC—one of the most underused resources on many established company websites.
Businesses accumulate significant knowledge through doing the same work every day. They know the questions customers ask, the mistakes people make, what affects cost and how projects work in practice. Turning that knowledge into useful articles gives potential customers more ways to discover the company and more reasons to remain on the website.
It also gives core service pages valuable internal links. Instead of every page existing independently, the site becomes a connected network of useful information.
Make the different parts of marketing support each other
Website development is not replacing video production at The Camera Guys. Cameras remain central to our work. The lines between different types of marketing content have simply become more connected.
A corporate video exists on a website. A case study may contain photography. A filming day can create social content. A completed project can become a blog article, and that article can direct somebody towards the corresponding service.
These pieces share the same objective: helping someone understand a business well enough to take the next step. That is what made the CJC project interesting. Instead of creating one isolated asset, we could consider the whole digital presence and make its parts work together.
The parts underneath matter
There is something satisfying about building a website for a company whose own work is fundamentally about building things. The disciplines are different, but they share a principle: the parts people notice at the end are only a small part of the job.
A finished website may look like typography, images, animation and navigation. Behind that sits its structure, content hierarchy, technical setup, search strategy, written copy and internal linking—the decisions that determine whether visitors can find what they need.
Much like construction, the foundation matters.
A website designed to keep developing
The CJC site is not intended to remain exactly as it is today. New projects will be completed, new photography and video will become available, further questions will warrant articles, and services may evolve.
A strong foundation makes those additions easier without requiring another complete redesign. For CJC Contracts, the new site provides that foundation. For us, it demonstrates what can happen when video, written content and website design are treated as parts of the same project.
Producing good content is only half the job. Making sure people can find and understand it matters too. Explore our wider video, photography and creative services, or talk to us about bringing your website and visual content together.
