Case 04of 08
Fielder A site built for a fourteen-month decision
A timber-frame housebuilder with twenty-two staff, a stock WordPress theme and an enquiry inbox full of people wanting a shed. The job was not to convert faster. It was to stay credible across the fourteen months it takes somebody to decide to build a house.
The house library — specification is the copyFig. 01
The problem
Fielder build timber frames to passive-house standard and charge accordingly. Their website was a stock theme with a hero video of a forest, three stock photos and a contact form. It looked like a general contractor.
The consequence was not traffic, it was the wrong traffic. In the quarter before we started, 82% of enquiries were from people with no site, no budget and no planning permission. The sales director was spending two days a week politely saying no.
- 82% of enquiries unqualified — no site, no budget, no permission
- 4.1 MB homepage, 8.1s largest contentful paint on 4G
- No specification published anywhere, for any house
- Fourteen-month median from first visit to signed contract
- Six to eight return visits before an enquiry, from analytics
Before and after
The homepageEnquiries in total after publishing prices — and roughly three times as many that turned into a site visit. Volume was never the metric.
Publish the price
The argument of the project was one line: put indicative cost bands on every house. Fielder had never published a price and no competitor in their region does. The sales director was against it for three weeks.
The case was simple. You cannot filter a fourteen-month decision with a contact form; the only filter that works is the number. Publishing a band loses the enquiries that were never going to close and keeps the ones that were — and it does that work at 2am, six visits before anybody fills in anything.
- Indicative band on every house, with what is and is not inside it
- Full specification published: U-values, floor areas, frame-up days
- Spec pack downloadable as a PDF with no form and no email gate
- Enquiry form asks three questions, one of which is the plot postcode
- Cost bands reviewed quarterly by Fielder, editable without us
A fourteen-month visit
Six returns before one formQ3 is the site without published cost bands; bands went live in Q4, which is why the two are separated here. Total enquiry volume fell 31% across the period and Fielder consider that the point. Qualification is judged by their sales director against the same three criteria he used before the project.
The identity
The old logo was a tree. Every timber company has a tree. The new mark is the wordmark and a full stop — a joint, set tight, in the same weight contrast the rest of the studio system uses.
The palette came off the material: charred larch, oak, lime render, winter sky. The typographic rule is that numbers lead. A house is introduced by its floor area and its frame-up time, because that is what the audience is actually comparing.
- Wordmark, four colours, one typeface, three sizes — deliberately small
- Applied to site, spec packs, site boards and vehicle livery
- Photography direction: process over product, no dressed interiors
- A five-page guide, not a forty-page one, because it has to be used
The identity
Wordmark, palette, voiceResults
Each with its methodI was against publishing prices for three weeks. We get a third fewer enquiries now and I have stopped dreading the inbox.
LogWeek by week
The build log
Seven weeks, of which three were spent arguing about one number.
Paid discovery. Two days reading eighteen months of enquiry emails and sitting in on four sales calls. The unqualified-enquiry number came out of that.
Identity. Three directions, one presentation, decision in the room. The wordmark-and-stop route was the cheapest to apply and they chose it on that basis.
House library built first, because it is the whole site. Content model designed with their technical manager so they could add frames without us.
The cost-band argument. We built both versions, with and without bands, on the same staging URL and let the sales director sit with them.
Performance pass. Video cut, images budgeted per template, fonts subset. 4.1 MB down to 310 KB with no visual compromise anyone noticed.
Launch without bands, on their decision. Spec packs, site boards and livery artwork handed over.
Cost bands added after the first month of enquiry data. This is the argument we should have won in week four.
What shipped
Six deliverablesWhat we would do differently
We launched without the cost bands because the client was not ready, then added them in month two after the enquiry data made the case for us. That was the right outcome by the wrong route: the first month of data is not comparable to anything, and we lost a clean baseline. Now, when a project turns on one contentious decision, we build both versions in discovery and let the client sit with them — which is what we eventually did in week four, three weeks late.
Who did it
CreditsIdentity, content model, front end, performance, spec-pack generation. One person, six weeks.
Two days on site during a frame raise. Process, not dressed interiors — briefed against the identity, not a shot list.
Sales director as decision-maker and reluctant hero of the cost-band argument; technical manager who now maintains the house library.
Two build slots openNext start: March