A website that finally matched the firm behind it

The firm advised mid-sized companies on serious decisions, and its website said otherwise. Built five years earlier on a page builder, it loaded in six seconds on a phone, failed basic accessibility checks and buried the services under a stock photo. Prospects arrived through referrals, looked at the site, and sometimes did not call.

The partners wanted a site that felt like the firm: precise, calm, credible. The marketing manager needed something she could update herself and defend in a board meeting.

We began with the audience rather than the pages. Who visits, what they need to confirm in thirty seconds, and what makes them pick up the phone. That cut the sitemap from twenty-two pages to nine.

We wrote the copy first, then designed around it. Each service page answers three questions: what the firm does, for whom, and what happens next. The design uses the firm's existing typography and a restrained palette, with no stock imagery.

Technically: Next.js, statically rendered, self-hosted fonts, optimised images, a headless CMS for the content the marketing team changes, and cookie-less analytics so there is no consent banner. The site is built for Dutch and French from day one even though it launched in English.

Lighthouse on mobile went from 41 to 98 for performance, with 100 for accessibility, best practices and SEO. Largest Contentful Paint fell from 5.8 to 1.2 seconds. Within six months, qualified inbound enquiries through the site rose by seventy percent, tracked through analytics goals and the firm's own intake log.

The project took seven weeks from kickoff to launch. The marketing manager has updated the site herself since the first week.

Next.js with TypeScript and Tailwind CSS, a headless CMS the client chose, Umami analytics self-hosted, Docker on an EU VPS with automated deployments. The client owns the repository, the design system and the content.