Weatherer Bailey Bragg

Weatherer Bailey Bragg had evolved, with a new company name and a more focused set of services, and they wanted a website that reflected that. Their WordPress site had served them well for years, building up an archive of news and budget articles going back to 2007.

So this was two jobs. The first was a refresh: keep the identity clients already recognise, then bring the look and content in line with the firm today. The second was a port: move the site from WordPress onto a custom-coded build.

A firm this established also has a long trail of addresses in Google and in other people's links, and an office that runs on its email. Neither could be allowed to break in the move.

I rebuilt the site from scratch, then worked through the content with the client page by page before moving the domain across.

A refresh, not a rebrand

• Custom-coded in Next.js and Tailwind, hosted on Vercel. No WordPress, no theme and no plugins to keep patched.
• The firm's identity kept and sharpened: the WBB crimson from the logo, and their long-standing line, “We build businesses”, now leading the home page.
• A typeface pairing with some authority, a serif for headings and a clean sans-serif for reading, on warm neutral backgrounds. Right for a Chartered firm, without looking dated.
• Reasons to trust the firm placed up front: ICAEW Chartered status, one senior point of contact, and proactive advice through the year.
• Client testimonials given a proper home, nine of them on the home page, covering services from payroll to corporation tax.

Content that matches the business

Most of the work here was editorial, and the client's feedback shaped it directly.

• The services list shaped around the firm's focus today. Tax pages were brought together into one, and Bookkeeping & VAT Returns and Professional Indemnity Insurance were added.
• A single place to edit every service. Nine pages run from one content file, so the list, the pages and the sitemap always stay in step.
• Annual Accounts expanded into clear sections for limited companies, sole traders and partnerships, so each visitor finds their own situation.
• The new name and credentials used throughout: WBB Accountants Ltd T/A Weatherer Bailey Bragg, ICAEW and Chartered.
• A new Meet the Team page with names, job titles and direct email addresses, and one contact number in place of several.

Enquiries that reach a person

The contact form emails each enquiry straight to the office, with the visitor set as the reply-to, so pressing Reply answers them directly. A hidden honeypot field quietly stops most spam bots without making real visitors solve a puzzle. If the email service ever fails, the form says so and gives the phone number, rather than letting an enquiry disappear without anyone knowing.

Leaving WordPress without leaving dead links

Before the switch I pulled the old site's full list of addresses from WordPress itself, then decided where each one should go.

• Pages that still exist point to their replacement. The old /annual-accounts.html now goes straight to the new Annual Accounts page, and the many separate tax pages all go to the new Tax page.
• Other service addresses point to the services overview, so a visitor from an old link still lands somewhere useful.
• Archived news and budget articles point to the home page. The new site starts with a clean slate, and links to the archive still arrive somewhere useful rather than an error.
• Then I tested it. I ran the old site's sitemap against the new one, and 245 old addresses now redirect permanently to a live page.
• Search essentials rebuilt into the site: a new sitemap and robots file, a canonical address on each page, a share card for social media, and structured data identifying the firm as an accounting service.

Moving the domain, leaving the email alone

The office email runs on Microsoft 365 through the same domain as the website, so the move was limited to the records that point to the website. The mail records stayed exactly as they were and were still in place after the switch. Sending for the contact form sits on its own subdomain, kept apart from the office mail, with DKIM and DMARC records in place.