March marked the end of a six month project to modernise the entire online presence of P A Hollingworth & Co Ltd, and their affiliated businesses.

P A Hollingworth were established in 1979, some what pre-internet, and are a very successful local building contractor who have expanded consistently throughout their history in East Kent. They are renowned for work of the highest quality, without compromise, and are as comfortable with modern developments as with period buildings. With their sister company, Oasis, they now cover building services, electrical work, swimming pool installation and hot tub retail from their large premises and showroom between Woodnesborough and Eastry.

WordPress was chosen as the back-bone for these websites due to its advantages in SEO, customer friendliness, a wide range of training/resources available and developer agnosticism (meaning any up-to-date web developer would be able to work with these sites if something were to happen to mtstudios).

Initially we built a special landing page website for their KMFM radio adverts – pahkent.com.  This enabled careful tracking of the success of their somewhat expensive ads as the web address given out on the radio was only used on the radio – the website was also hidden from Google so that every visitor to the site must have started by hearing a radio advert.  There is no better way for measuring and calculating return on investment as you have independent figures for the success of a somewhat risky bit of marketing.

A second site was then created specifically for use on printed adverts: pahkent.co.uk.  This enabled the three parts of the construction business to be represented through a single domain and, again, gave us valuable measurements thanks to the ubiquitous Google Analytics.

Attention was then turned to a new off shoot of the main business –  a part of the building services company specialising in domestic and commercial electrical contracts within Kent: electricalcontractorsinkent.co.uk  Electrician in Canterbury.  This website had to embrace a number of new online ideas for P A Hollingworth: social media and, more importantly, mobile friendly design that can resize to accommodate the screen sizes of mobile phones and tablets, and pass the very important Google mobile friendly test (read more about the Google test here).

Upon completion of that website, we made two for their successful swimming pool and hot tub business: www.oasisswimmingpools.com and oasishottubskent.co.uk.  These were a radical redesign, embracing social networking, blogging, SEO and mobile friendliness whilst still providing good looking, trust inducing, design and compelling copy.  Sam Hunnisett, director of Oasis was so thrilled with oasishottubskent.co.uk she submitted it for a website competition (result pending) as the best example of a Vita Spa hot tub distributor web site she had ever seen.

As the end came to the Oasis sites we came back to the “big one” – the main website for the Building Contractor business: www.pahollingworth.co.uk.  This one had to be the crowning achievement – strong in all the above areas, but most importantly, a new site with a completely new layout and content that didn’t hurt hard-fought Search Engine position.  Luckily mtstudios have a lot of experience in this area – Matt has learned Internet Marketing, Google optimisation and transitional SEO the hard way: over a decade of experience, study (and occasional mistakes).  This enabled us to tackle the change in the most Google-friendly way possible and we’re now seeing the website on higher search engine positions than before the transition.

Overall Pete, the MD at P A Hollingworth & Co Ltd was very pleased, saying “I would end by stating for the record I have been immensely pleased with everything you and yours have provided to date and have unquestionable trust and faith in you personally.” which may be amongst the very nicest compliments we have been paid!

The team at mtstudios would just like to say a personal thanks to Sarah Paul and Sam Hunnisett whose hard work and punctuality allowed a project of this size to go just about as smoothly as it could.