The Client
The Urban Gardener is a family-run landscaping company based in Chorlton, led by Damian Steadman. For more than 25 years the team has designed and built bespoke gardens across South Manchester, Stockport and Cheshire, including paving, decking, pergolas and garden structures, driveways, fencing and complete outdoor living spaces.
Theirs is design-led work at the premium end of the market: full garden transformations, managed from first concept to final planting, built with quality materials and made to last.
The Brief
It started as a hosting job. The agency that had built and looked after The Urban Gardener’s website was closing down, and Damian needed someone to take over the hosting and maintenance.
Once the site was in our care, the real problem became clear. It dated back to 2016 and was showing every one of those years: outdated plugins, an old-fashioned build, and a logo that only existed as a JPG when it should have been crisp, scalable vector artwork. Keeping it running was possible. Keeping it running well wasn’t.
There was a bigger issue than the technology, too. The Urban Gardener’s work is highly visual, the kind of gardens people save photos of, and the old site simply didn’t show it. A business doing high-end garden renovations was being represented by a website that undersold them.
The Outcome
The Urban Gardener now has a website that looks like the work they do. Large, confident photography leads every page, finished projects are presented as case studies in their own right, and each service has room to explain itself properly, so a homeowner planning a new garden can see the standard of the finished result long before they pick up the phone.
Underneath, the site is modern, fast and maintainable. The logo is sharp on every screen, the build is clean, and with the site on our hosting it’s kept technically up to date month after month, so it won’t quietly slide back into the state we found it in.
Our Approach
Steady the ship first
Before any talk of a redesign, we moved the site across to our hosting and made sure it was safe and stable. Damian had come to us with an urgent, practical problem, and that deserved solving first. Only once we’d seen the site from the inside did we recommend a rebuild, and by then we could show exactly why.
Rebuild rather than patch
A decade-old website can be patched almost indefinitely, but every fix costs more than the last and none of them make it look any newer. We were honest that a fresh build would cost less in the long run than nursing the old one along, and would give the business something worth sending customers to.
Let the gardens do the selling
Nobody chooses a landscaper on words alone. We designed the new site around photography, with full-width imagery, galleries on the service pages and dedicated project write-ups, so the quality of the work is the first thing a visitor sees, not something they have to go looking for.
Speak to the right customer
The Urban Gardener’s best work is the complete garden transformation, not the odd job. The site’s structure and messaging are pitched at homeowners planning a proper project: what the process looks like, how long it takes, and what makes a design-led build different from a quick fix.
What we delivered
The Logo & Identity
The Urban Gardener already had a logo their customers recognised, so this was a refresh rather than a rebrand. We redrew the mark as clean vector artwork, giving the business a logo that stays pin-sharp at any size, on a phone screen, a van or a site board, along with light and dark versions for different backgrounds and a matching favicon.
Logo
Colours
Fonts
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Web Design
Rebuilt from scratch on WordPress, the new site is organised around how people actually plan a garden project.
Hosting & Care
The relationship began with hosting, and it continues there. The Urban Gardener’s site sits on our hosting and care plan, which keeps WordPress, the theme and every plugin up to date, backed up and monitored. It’s the simplest plan we offer, and it’s still enough to make sure the site never again falls years behind, which is exactly how the old one ended up needing a rebuild.
As with all our websites, we implemented on-page SEO from the start: structured page titles, descriptions and location targeting across South Manchester, Stockport and Cheshire.