Make local feel valuable
The opening message connects the company to Southampton, the Waterside and the New Forest. It gives the brand a distinct territory and makes the service area immediately clear.
Client project / Waterside Carpets
A local name,
properly renewed.
A complete rethink of an established flooring company’s digital presence. The result is a confident, responsive website built around local enquiries, showroom visits and the way customers actually choose flooring.
ClientWaterside Carpets
SectorFlooring retail & fitting
LocationSouthampton & New Forest
Live sitewatersidecarpets.co.uk ↗
The brief
Keep the trust.
Lose the age.
Waterside Carpets had the most valuable part already: a recognised local name, years of practical flooring knowledge and a showroom serving Southampton, the Waterside and the New Forest. The old website carried that history, but its structure, presentation and technology made the business feel older than the service customers received.
The task was not simply to make the pages look more modern. The new site needed to explain the full offer quickly, distinguish the main flooring categories and make the next step obvious for somebody who might still be uncertain about materials, measuring or fitting.
We retained the familiarity of the Waterside name while giving it a more confident visual setting. The copy became clearer and more specific, the regional positioning moved to the front of the story, and free estimates became a genuine action rather than a detail hidden deeper in the site.
The result needed to feel calm, established and useful. It also had to work well for homeowners browsing on a phone, where much of the first contact with a local flooring company now happens.
Strategy and design
Built around how
flooring is chosen.
Separate the choices
Carpet, vinyl, LVT and laminate each have a clear place in the journey. Customers can understand the difference without working through a crowded product catalogue.
Offer a useful next step
The free estimate and showroom visit are treated as primary actions throughout the site. They appear when the customer is ready, without turning every section into a sales pitch.
Before / After
A clearer first
impression.
Design to deployment
One joined-up
piece of work.
The visual direction combines a restrained coastal palette with large editorial typography and warm residential imagery. The aim was to connect the Waterside location with the feeling customers want from a finished home, without relying on the familiar visual clichés of a flooring showroom.
Every section was designed responsively from the outset. Navigation simplifies on smaller screens, headings keep their impact without becoming difficult to read, and the main actions remain easy to reach. The page is paced to give the photography room while still moving customers towards useful service information.
The production build was kept focused and lightweight. Local assets removed the old site’s external dependencies, and the enquiry journey was connected to a secure server-side handler suitable for the client’s cPanel hosting rather than relying on a platform-specific form service.
Launch involved more than uploading a homepage. We checked the new document root, repaired the enquiry handling, preserved Microsoft 365 mail routing, verified the DNS cutover and confirmed HTTPS across both the root and www domains. That careful handover meant the public website could change without disrupting the business systems behind it.
What changed
Modern where
it matters.
-
01
Local positioning
Southampton, the Waterside and the New Forest are clear from the first screen, giving the company a stronger and more memorable territory. -
02
A stronger enquiry journey
Free estimate and showroom actions remain visible without overwhelming the page or interrupting the flooring story. -
03
Responsive, focused presentation
Flooring categories, service detail and trust content now read cleanly on phones, tablets and larger desktop screens. -
04
A careful live migration
The new site moved to cPanel with HTTPS, a working enquiry handler and Microsoft 365 mail records preserved throughout the cutover.
Ready to move
past the old site?
We can rebuild the public face without losing the trust the business has already earned.
Start a conversation ↗