CASE STUDY 07
ALLTIME
REMOVALS & STORAGE
THE PROBLEM
A family removals firm, run by the same couple since 2002, with a 4.8-star rating, proper accreditations and a fleet with a genuinely charming logo on the side. We'd vouch for them personally: one of us spent a summer loading those vans, twenty years ago.
The website was where the trouble lived. Years of WordPress patches by a string of different web people had left around 35 links pointing at pages that don't exist, including the homepage's own "read our testimonials" button. Four separate testimonial pages showed identical content. A gallery plugin had quietly died, printing its own shortcode where photos should be. A draft note ("please confirm exact star count before publishing") had made it onto the live contact page. And on one town page, a comment box left open to bots had collected 33 spam comments of the sort you'd really rather a customer never saw. None of this is anyone at Alltime's fault; it's what happens when software is left in charge of itself.
WHAT WE DID
Every page came with us. Same web addresses, a redirect map for the handful we merged, so twenty years of Google standing survives the move, which felt like the least a removals firm should expect from its movers. The design starts from their own wordmark, black Alltime, blue Removals, the yellow from the logo doing the small details, and their own photographs: the van outside the ivy-covered manor house earns the hero slot it always deserved.
- Their words, minus the typos. The copy was already theirs and often lovely; we kept the Rubik's cube joke in the moving guide and gave their "we're with you between the chapters" line pride of place instead of leaving it buried on seven clone pages.
- One testimonials page that earns it. Four identical pages became one: real Google reviews, the written thank-yous, both video testimonials, and buttons to leave a new review where they actually help.
- Eleven town pages with local knowledge in them. Which streets need a parking suspension, which council to ask, which road out of town the van takes. The kind of thing they know anyway; now the website knows it too.
- The quote survey kept working. Their online survey tool carried straight over, so the day the new site goes live, quotes keep arriving.
- Calling is one tap. Phone and WhatsApp pinned to the bottom of every page on mobiles, where a thumb can reach them.
- Nothing left to rot. Plain pages, no plugins, no comment boxes, no admin panel to hack or patch. The failure mode that produced all of the above simply isn't there.
THE RESULT
Moving house is the most stressful thing most people organise, and they choose their movers on a phone, at night, by whoever seems most trustworthy. Alltime were always the trustworthy ones; now the website agrees. Twenty-two pages, every one of them theirs, and not a dead link in the building.