CJM Bathrooms

A bathroom renovation business sells through two things: examples of finished work and what previous customers say. Everything else on the site is supporting material.

The site ran on WordPress, the usual starting point for a small business in this trade. It had reviews from real customers, and those reviews were the most valuable content on it. Losing them in a rebuild would have been the one expensive mistake available.

So the brief was not a redesign. It was a move: keep what is working, change what the site is standing on.

We rebuilt the site on our own code. We do not build in WordPress, and moving a business off it is a job we do regularly, so the process here was the one we already use.

The order of work matters more than the tooling. First an inventory: every page, every image, every review, every form, every URL someone might already have a link to. Nothing gets rebuilt from memory.

Then the rebuild, page by page, with the content carried over rather than retyped, running on a separate address while the old site is still live, so the client can click through it and say what is wrong before anything changes for the public.

Only after that does the switch happen.

The cutover is the part where a rebuild goes visibly wrong in public, so it is the part worth planning in the most detail.

DNS was moved to Cloudflare: one place to see the records, short time to live values while the change is in progress, and a certificate in place before the switch rather than after it.

The sequence: lower the TTL in advance, so the change propagates in minutes rather than in a day. Confirm the new server answers on the domain and on the www version. Check the certificate. Then move the records.

Immediately after the switch: the home page, the service pages, the contact form and the site on a phone, all checked on a connection that has never seen the old site. The previous setup stays available until the new one is confirmed working, which makes a rollback a decision rather than an emergency.

The reviews written by previous customers were carried across to the new site. That sounds like a small line in a project plan and it is the part we were most careful about.

Reviews are the content a renovation business cannot recreate. A page can be rewritten in an afternoon. A customer who wrote about their bathroom three years ago is not going to write it again because a website changed.

So they moved with the site: the text, who said it, and the work it referred to, as part of the page rather than a widget loading from somewhere else.

Analytics on this site does not run until the visitor makes a choice. Before that choice, nothing measuring the visit is loaded.

That is the behaviour the law expects, and the behaviour many sites claim without having it. The usual failure is a banner that looks correct while the tag fires the moment the page opens.

The way to know which one you have is to check: open the site in a clean browser, look at what gets stored and what requests go out before anything is clicked, then repeat after rejecting, after accepting and after withdrawing consent. Four states, four checks.

We set this up as part of the build, not as something added later when somebody asks.

The site is live on its own code, with no theme licence and no plugin stack to keep updated. The business owns the code, the content and the domain.

Editing is done in an admin area, so text, services and new work go up without a developer.

The reviews are still there, still visible, and no longer depend on a plugin continuing to exist.

Analytics reports on visitors who agreed to be counted, so the numbers are smaller than on a site measuring everyone, and they can be defended.

We have not published performance figures for this project. If the client agrees to share them, they will appear here, and not before.

We are based in Timișoara, Romania. We have no office in Ireland and we do not claim one. This project ran entirely remotely, from the first call to the cutover.

In practice that meant calls in English, one point of contact throughout, written summaries after each call, and a test address the client could open to see the state of the build.

The cutover was scheduled rather than improvised, at a time agreed with the client, with someone available on both sides during the switch. Distance changes the arrangements. It did not change the work.

This is the project we point to when a business in Ireland asks whether working with a studio abroad is a problem in practice.

Related pages: our web design agency in Ireland