Land & Mortar
The photographs were already good, so the site had to deserve them. Harry designs and builds gardens out of Brighton & Hove, and the photographs of his finished projects had to carry the whole site.
What Harry had
He has been at this since 2018. The studio sits in Brighton & Hove and the jobs run a good deal further than that, into Rye, into London, across the rest of the south east, and onto a handful of projects in France. Landscaping at that level gets bought with the eyes long before anybody reads a sentence about it, so the photographs of his finished work were always going to be the strongest thing on the page.
The template problem
A garden that took months, squeezed into a narrow column, cropped square and stacked beside two other thumbnails, looks like a market stall, and that is the default arrangement most templates hand you. Somebody choosing who is going to dig up the back of their house is deciding on the strength of one or two images, so shrinking those images to thumbnail size throws away the only argument the site has.
The layout
Every decision on the build came back to that. Images run big and arrive one at a time with room around them, at a size where you can read the jointing on a patio and see how a border was planted. Between the project work sit close-ups of the materials themselves, limestone porcelain, brick, flint and oak, shot at the distance you would see them from standing on the finished thing. The line at the top of the site reads “Exterior excellence, from the ground up.” The enquiry route stays within reach the whole way down, because somebody who has just seen the picture that sold them should not have to go hunting for a way to ask about it.
Two testimonials, and no star system
There are two client testimonials on the site and no star ratings anywhere. Two people describing their own garden in their own words is worth more here than a row of gold stars, which any website in the world can draw and nobody can check, and I have not put a rating widget on it since. There is no review of me from this job either, because he has not written one and I am not about to write it for him.
His own domain
For a few weeks this site sat on a preview address while the paperwork on his own domain went through, and this page said so rather than hoping you never looked at the bar along the top. That wait ended on 4 August. It now lives at landandmortar.co.uk like every other site I have put live, on a domain the client owns outright.
The live site
Reading me describe photographs is a poor substitute for looking at them, so open it on your phone and see whether the work holds up at that size.
The other sites I have put live
If your own photographs are being wasted the way his were, send me two or three of them and I will show you what they would look like given some room.