He bought the business. The website still belonged to the last owner.
First Stop Electrical had the reputation, the reviews and the work. What it had online was a brochure describing a business that had since changed hands, with no pricing, no clear next step and nothing being counted. MEL read the site as a funnel, found where it leaked at every stage, and rebuilt it into something worth sending paid traffic to.
Read as a funnel rather than a website, it lost people at every single stage.
First Stop is a working Auckland trade business with a genuine reputation behind it. The website was not the problem anyone had asked to solve. It had been hosted and backed up for years, but not actively maintained, and it still described the business as it was before it changed hands.
The brief that arrived was about advertising. The honest answer was that advertising would have made things worse. So rather than audit the site as a checklist of pages, MEL read it as a funnel, stage by stage, and wrote down where each stage lost people.
Almost nobody arrived.
The homepage title was three letters. Eight service pages competed for the same terms with no hierarchy. Test and Tag existed only as an option inside a form, so there was nothing for a search engine or an AI assistant to find at all.
The people who did arrive met the previous owner's business.
Ownership and team content predated the purchase, the team section was empty, and industrial stock photography fronted pages aimed at homeowners.
Nothing answered the questions that decide the job.
No pricing anywhere, which is the most common question asked before anyone picks up the phone. No guarantee, insurance or membership signals. Supplier claims that pointed in three directions at once.
The ask was confusing, and then it was hard work.
Four different phrasings of the same request competed on one page behind a single button. The quote forms ran to thirteen and twenty fields. On a phone there was no callback action above the fold and no acknowledgement afterwards, so making contact felt like sending something into a void.
And none of it was being counted.
With no conversion tracking and no click-to-call events, there was no way to know which of those leaks was costing the most.
Fix the funnel before you pay for traffic.
Audit
Platform, security, performance and content. Find out what you are building on before you build on it.
Diagnose
Read the site as a funnel, not a page list. Write down where each stage loses people.
Blueprint
Map four audiences and four intents. Choose one primary action and rank everything beneath it.
Build
Design the journey, write the pages, make the two pages that answer the question nobody was answering.
Measure
Tracking, funnel-stage events and Business Profile, so the next decision is made on data.
Built around one action, on every page, on every screen.
A live view of firststop.co.nz. The status strip above the header changes by hour and weekday - on the tools, in the office, weekend, before seven - because the primary action is ringing someone, and knowing whether someone will pick up is most of the decision.
Desktop · firststop.co.nz
Mobile · 414px
01 / The audit, and the repairs
A full platform, security, performance and content audit before anything was built on top: core, theme and plugin versions, admin access and two-factor status, malware and integrity scanning, backup coverage with a verified restore point, form delivery and email deliverability, mobile rendering, broken links and orphaned pages. Then the repairs, inside the same fee rather than quoted back as extras. First Stop kept the written findings report and its prioritised action list either way.
02 / Making the site tell the truth
The public record brought up to date: ownership and About rewritten around the change of hands, trading hours, address and contact details corrected, and the service area settled on one consistent description instead of two. Then the trust signals that were missing entirely - Master Electricians membership, a $20,000 workmanship guarantee, $5m public liability insurance, licensing - built into a site-wide panel that carries them into every page template rather than sitting on one page nobody visits. Every factual claim was approved by First Stop before publication, and no accreditation was published until it was confirmed in writing.
03 / The funnel blueprint
The centre of the project. Audience, intent and entry points mapped for each of the four service streams - residential electrical, heat pumps, Test and Tag, and property management - then the journey from first impression to enquiry defined stage by stage, with the message each stage has to carry. One primary action was chosen and carried through every page: a phone call, set at display size in both the emergency block and the footer, with a person behind it rather than a ticket number. Request a quote sits second, as the single outlined button in the header. First Stop keeps the blueprint as a written document - it guides the site, the ads, and anything built after this project.
04 / The two pages that answer the question
Pricing and Test and Tag, both new. Pricing carries a published rate table, call-out and minimum charge terms, and plain-English notes on what is fixed, what is estimated and when a site visit is needed. Test and Tag explains what it is, who it applies to and the intervals that apply by environment, with sections for property managers, commercial premises, hospitality, construction and landlords, a working cost calculator, and a commercial enquiry path built for recurring multi-site work. Both went into the primary navigation. Most electricians will publish neither.
05 / Brand assets that could actually be used
The entire brand arrived as a single flat JPG of the horizontal logo. No vector, no reverse version, no icon, nothing that could scale, sit on a dark background or work as a favicon. MEL rebuilt it: the logo vector-traced to outlines with the frame and tab reconstructed as exact geometry, a single-colour reverse version for dark backgrounds, and a simplified site icon drawn from the socket mark. Delivered as SVG plus transparent PNG at 3000px, sRGB, cropped tight. Assets the business owns and can hand to a signwriter or a van wrapper, not just to us.
06 / Found by search, cited by AI
Two jobs, not one. On the search side: page titles, meta descriptions and heading structure across the named pages, the eight competing service pages resolved into a clear hierarchy, internal linking into the enquiry pathways, and the usual indexability, canonical and sitemap checks. On the answer-engine side: content structured so assistants can extract and cite it accurately, question-and-answer formatting matching how people actually ask, LocalBusiness, Service and FAQ structured data, and plain factual statements an assistant can quote without hedging. Then the measurement that makes all of it reviewable - GA4 in First Stop's own ownership, Search Console verified, enquiry and click-to-call conversion tracking, funnel-stage events so drop-off can be seen rather than guessed, and Google Business Profile claimed and completed.
A trade website that looks like nothing else in the category.
The old site had the problem most services websites have. It was built on a standard template, using the typefaces, colours and stock photography everybody else in the category uses. Looking credible and looking identical had become the same thing.
What replaced it is deliberately narrow. Three working colours and two typefaces. Headlines at display size in a regular weight with tight negative tracking, not the heavy bold the trades default to. Form fields are a single hairline rule rather than a box. Nothing is a rounded card with a drop shadow.
Paper
#F2F1ED
Never pure white
Ink
#101010
Never pure black
Red surface
#E5241B
Large fills
Logo red
#FF0000
The mark, untouched
Silver
#A1A4A9
Off the logo keyline
The red is the discipline. It is withheld across the whole page and then spent once, on a full-bleed block carrying the emergency message. Used everywhere at once it would stop meaning anything.
Power and warmth, done properly.
Switzer · Regular 400 · tracking -0.045em
01 — Electrical & air conditioning / Auckland / Since 2011
JetBrains Mono · 11px · metadata layer only
The monospace never carries a sentence. It numbers sections, labels fields and captions photographs - borrowing the language of a docket and a job sheet rather than a brochure.
Both rebuilt from a single flat JPG. The logo was vector-traced to outlines with the frame and tab reconstructed as exact geometry; the icon was drawn from the socket mark so the brand has something that works at 32 pixels. Both are live on the site today.
Shot on their jobs, not bought.
The industrial stock photography that fronted pages aimed at homeowners is gone. What replaced it is First Stop's own completed work, with location metadata stripped before upload so a customer's address does not travel with a photograph of their house.
Paid traffic multiplies whatever the funnel already does.
The work First Stop originally asked about was advertising. Sending Google and Meta budget to the site as it stood would have bought clicks that arrived at an out-of-date business, found no price, met a twenty-field form and vanished uncounted.
So the sequence was the recommendation: build the owned website, the journey, the tracking and the account infrastructure once, then scale it with real enquiry data. A landing page template built to receive paid traffic was included, so the campaigns have somewhere to land that was designed for them.
That is a slower first invoice and a much better second one.
Most services websites are brochures with a contact form at the bottom.
A funnel is a sequence, not a page.
Four audiences arriving with four different intents need four routes in and one clear action out. Work that out first and the page structure writes itself.
Pricing is a conversion feature.
The most common question asked before anyone calls a tradesperson is what it costs. A site that will not answer it loses to one that will, regardless of who does the better work.
Looking credible and looking identical are not the same thing.
Template, stock photography and the category's default typefaces buy instant legitimacy and instant anonymity. A narrow, deliberate system costs no more to build.
If it is not measured, it cannot be improved.
Conversion tracking and funnel-stage events are what turn a redesign from an opinion into something you can review in ninety days.
First Stop combined funnel design, website and technology work, and search, answer-engine and measurement foundations.
Thinking about turning on ads?
Fix the funnel first. MEL audits what you have, designs the journey, builds the pages and sets up the measurement - so when the spend starts it lands somewhere that converts, and every enquiry can be traced back to its source.