Fourteen years, two websites and a change of name

Andrew Steel came to us in 2012 running Steel Co Signs, a sign maker in Potters Bar with plans to grow. We built the website that helped, and we have been revising and rebuilding it ever since, through a decade of expansion and, in 2021, a new name above the door.

Working together: Since 2012
Sector: Signage & engraving
Project: Two websites, one relationship

This client is based in Hertford

The starting point

Responsive, back when that was new

When Steel Co Signs came to us in 2012, they were a sign maker in Potters Bar, the same town as us, with ambitions rather larger than their website. They wanted something that would help the business grow, and that would work properly for the customers who were increasingly finding them on a phone.

So we built them a fully responsive site. That is an unremarkable thing to say now. In 2012 it was not. Responsive design was barely two years old, and most small business websites still shipped either a separate, cut-down mobile version or nothing at all. Building it that way from the start meant the site never needed the anxious retrofit that caught out so many others.

Getting found

Page one, and then staying there

A sign maker lives or dies by local search. Someone needs a shopfront sign, a set of wayfinding boards or a van liveried, and they type what they want followed by where they are. A great deal of time went into the search side of the site, and it paid off: Steel Co Signs reached the first page of Google for a good number of the terms that mattered to them.

Holding that position was the longer job. Search has been rewritten several times over since 2012, and rankings earned under one set of rules do not survive the next on their own. The site was revised as the ground moved, which is the part of SEO that rarely gets talked about and is most of the actual work. The terms themselves have changed since, because the business has.

Keeping pace

A website that grew with the business

In 2016 the business outgrew Potters Bar and moved eleven miles up the road to Hertford. A relocation is usually more disruptive to a website than it sounds, because a sign maker's customers search by town, and a site that has earned its place in one has to start again in another. This one was gentler than most. The site had already been broadened out towards county-wide terms rather than resting on the town it started in, so the results were part of the way there before the move happened. We adjusted where the key terms sat to reflect the new address, and the ground that had been gained held.

As the business expanded, the site expanded with it: new products as the range widened, and a gallery of completed projects that grew with every job worth photographing. For a sign maker that gallery does more work than any amount of copy. People want to see the thing itself, on a building, in daylight.

None of that was a redesign. It was the ordinary, regular attention a working website needs, which is exactly what stops one quietly ageing out from underneath a business.

The rebrand

A new name, and a site built for it

In 2021 the business took over another Hertford sign company, East Herts Signs, and decided to trade under that name from then on. It was more than a change of logo. The work had moved upmarket, towards organisations that run procurement processes and want to see a certain seriousness before they will pick up the phone.

So the second site was not a reskin of the first. We built it around who they were selling to now: project management, surveys, design, manufacture, installation and the health and safety documentation that comes with it, presented as a capability rather than a product list. Their work is with the sort of client who checks first, county council and constabulary contracts, a pharmaceutical campus, national charities, and the site was built to let that speak. It has carried on evolving in the years since.

What we have built

Two websites, fourteen years apart

Responsive from the start

A fully responsive website in 2012, built that way from the beginning rather than retrofitted once phones made it unavoidable.

Found where it counts

Search work that put the early site on the first page of Google for a good number of the terms that mattered to the business then.

A gallery that grew

Completed projects added as they finished, because a sign maker is judged on the work itself rather than on the description of it.

A rebrand, not a reskin

A new site for the East Herts Signs name in 2021, built around the audience they had grown into rather than the one they started with.

Built for people who check

Project management, surveys, manufacture, installation and safety documentation laid out as a capability, for clients who look before they call.

Still going

Fourteen years of revisions, rebuilds and regular attention, with the same people at both ends of the phone.

We have used the web site design, hosting & SEO services from Alan & his team @ Nialto Services for a number of years. Their knowledge, expertise & professionalism are second to none. Having briefed Nialto Services with our requirements the site & service they delivered exceeded all our expectations. In a world of tech Nialto Services are refreshingly easy to work with.

Andrew Steel, Steel Co Signs

Left in 2018, three years before the business became East Herts Signs.

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An illustration of the kind of homepage we design and build