Case study, 2023
GT Lift
A new website built from a design agency's files, giving GT Lifting a properly professional presence online and the ability to manage their machine-hire catalogue themselves without having to come back to a developer every time something needs changing.
GT Lifting needed a new website that reflected their brand properly, and that gave them the tools to manage and list their plant-hire machinery themselves, without having to lean on a developer every time something needed updating.
They came to me through a local design agency I'd worked with before. The designs were ready, the brand was already established, and what was needed was the build. I developed a custom WordPress theme from those designs and delivered a site the client could properly own and maintain themselves going forward.
The site they had at the time was honestly too basic to represent the business well, and offered no real way for the team to manage their machinery listings without technical help. The brief was actually pretty clear: build something that looked the part, was easy for the client to keep updated themselves, and could comfortably handle a growing catalogue of equipment available for hire.
The main constraint we were working with was a precise visual spec from the design agency. The build had to be properly faithful to the design across every device, not just a loose interpretation of it.
I developed the theme from scratch using the provided designs, building it on WordPress with Elementor as the page builder at the client's request. That choice kept day-to-day editing genuinely accessible to the in-house team, which mattered to the way they wanted to work.
The machinery listings are powered by custom post types and Advanced Custom Fields, which gives GT Lifting a structured but flexible way to add, update and manage their hire catalogue themselves without ever needing to touch any code.
Working from a design agency's files meant carefully translating a precise visual spec into a functioning theme, and keeping the build faithful to the intended design while making sure it still held up well across all the different devices and content variations it would need to handle.
SSE-network
Supplier · WordPress · ACF + PHP custom build
- A brand new site that properly represents GT Lifting and the work they do.
- The client team can manage all of the machinery listings themselves, independently.
- A clean handover with no ongoing dependency on a developer for the content updates.
- The design fidelity has been preserved across every device and across all the content variations.
In their words
“Dan took the designs and built exactly what we needed. The site looks the way we wanted it to and we can add new equipment ourselves, with no calls back to a developer every week.”
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