Case study

Case study: a fast, simple website for a Dover business.

A window cleaning business in Dover, rebuilt the zip.ms way. You can check each result yourself. The links are at the bottom.

The client and the problem

This is a local service business in Dover. People search, compare and choose in about a minute. Most do it on a phone. Its website is that minute.

The site had to open at once. It had to look as good as the business is. It also had to show up when people in its town search for its trade. Most sites like this are heavy templates. They do none of those three things.

What was built

Each page is built to be small, so it opens fast on a phone. There are no trackers (what this means) and no cookie banner. There is no code from anyone else. The site has a page for each service.

For plain words, there is a Plain English version of the JCM site. There is also an Easy Read version of the JCM site. Hidden labels help Google read each page the way people do.

It cannot get slower without anyone seeing, either. Each change is checked by software before it goes live. Some checks run in a real web browser. They look for things that broke or got slower.

The site also has a size limit that can only ever get smaller. If any check fails, the change does not go live.

The proof

The scores and times come from Google's free test, PageSpeed Insights. It was set to test a phone.

Accessibility, checked by hand

Google gives this site 100 for accessibility. But a software test misses most things that stop someone using a page. So I also tested each page by hand.

Each page meets WCAG 2.2. These are the world rules that help disabled people use websites. It also meets the stricter rules that apply to it. I checked each text colour against its background, in each colour setting. All of them are easy to read.

Each page has a Reading options panel. You can pick black on white, white on black, dark on cream or yellow on black. You can add more space between lines. Your choice stays with you from page to page.

The accessibility statement for that site lists what was tested and how. It also says what is still not perfect.

Where it shows on Google

This business has two kinds of client: homes and firms. When I checked, the site was on the first page of Google for both.

For homes in its village, it showed three times on that first page. It showed on the map, as its home page, and as the page for that village. For firms in the town, the page made for them was on the first page too.

It does not show on the first page for homes across the whole town. That is on purpose. Those searches bring requests for work this business does not take. A page aimed at what you really sell does better than one aimed at everyone.

Check it yourself