New website design and built to look professional.
Building custom in WordPress means that you get exactly what you need, nothing you don't
What did Ellipsis Land & Planning need?
Ellipsis Land & Planning delivers large-scale housing and infrastructure projects. The old site was not doing that story justice.
Led by Stephanie Moffat, Ellipsis operates at the serious end of development consultancy – complex planning projects, large housing schemes, infrastructure delivery from concept through to completion. The kind of work that speaks for itself, if the website gives it the right platform.
The existing site did not. The design was not keeping pace with the scale and calibre of the projects being delivered, and the structure was not making it easy for potential clients, partners and stakeholders to quickly understand what Ellipsis does and why it is the right choice.
The brief was a full redesign: same brand, sharper execution, and a structure built around showcasing the depth of experience Ellipsis had accumulated.
What the site needed to do:
- Immediately communicate the scale and seriousness of the work Ellipsis delivers
- Showcase delivered projects through well-structured case studies
- Balance professional authority with personality – credible without being corporate and cold
- Give Stephanie a platform that holds up in front of major developers, planners and funders
- Simplify the structure so visitors could navigate the business without getting lost
- Give the team full control over case studies and articles without technical support
Our approach
Project overview
A full redesign of an existing site for an established development consultancy. Existing brand retained, content reviewed and refined, structure rebuilt around the case studies and services that demonstrate the depth of what Ellipsis delivers.
Discovery and content
- Reviewed and refined existing content to sharpen the messaging around services and positioning
- Agreed site structure early to ensure clarity from the first page a visitor lands on
- Messaging reviewed for confidence and clarity – the site needed to match the scale of the work
- Case study structure planned to make delivered projects easy to browse and compelling to read
Design
- Full redesign within the existing brand – same identity, significantly stronger execution
- Contemporary, considered aesthetic informed by design references reflecting the sector
- Balance of authority and personality – professional without being rigid or generic
- Streamlined navigation across a focused set of sections: home, services, case studies, articles, contact
WordPress build
Bespoke build on our own custom starter theme. Custom ACF content blocks give the Ellipsis team full control over case studies, service pages and articles without needing technical support for every update.
Default Gutenberg blocks disabled entirely – every page uses the same controlled set of layouts, so the site stays consistent and on-brand regardless of who is updating it.
SEO foundations
Clean markup, logical page structure and on-page SEO configuration built in throughout. As Ellipsis publishes more case studies and articles, the platform is already set up to support search visibility – no remedial technical work required before content investment can begin.
Got a similar challenge?
If your website is not doing justice to the quality of work your business delivers – we should talk.
Tell us what you have and we will tell you honestly what we would do with it.
The results
This was a brand new website, so we have no comparison data.
100
Google PageSpeed score on mobile and desktop at launch
Zero
Third-party page builders or plugin frameworks – built entirely on our own custom theme
100%
Of content manageable by the Ellipsis team directly – case studies, articles and pages updated without developer involvement
Redesigned
Existing brand retained but fully redesigned – sharper, more confident, and built to match the scale of the work
Structured
Case study architecture built to showcase complex delivered projects clearly and compellingly
Ready
SEO foundations in place from launch – the platform grows in value with every case study and article published
Technical details
WordPress theme
Built on our own bare-bones WordPress starter theme. No inherited styles, no third-party framework dependencies, no bloat. Before any design work goes in, we run the blank theme through Google PageSpeed Insights and aim for 100 out of 100 on both mobile and desktop. That discipline is what makes the performance scores possible.
Plugins
We keep third-party plugins to a minimum. This site uses ACF-powered content blocks edited in the Gutenberg editor. The default WordPress block library was disabled entirely – editors can only use the purpose-built blocks we created, which means every page is built consistently and on-brand regardless of who published it.
Custom post types
Case studies and articles are managed through dedicated custom post types, giving each content type its own consistent template and URL structure. Adding a new case study is straightforward for the Ellipsis team – no developer involvement, no risk of breaking the layout.
SEO configuration
Page titles, meta descriptions and on-page structure configured throughout the build. Every case study and article published adds to the site’s search footprint – the architecture is designed to compound in value over time rather than sit static.
Why WordPress was the right platform for Ellipsis Land & Planning.
Development consultancies win work through reputation and relationships. The website is what happens when someone Googles you after a referral.
For a business like Ellipsis, the website is rarely the first touchpoint. It is the second. Someone hears about Stephanie’s work through a contact, looks her up, and within thirty seconds they have formed a view of whether this is a serious operation or not.
That second touchpoint either confirms the referral or undermines it. A generic template site – or one that has fallen behind the quality of the actual work being done – does the latter.
WordPress gave us the ability to build something that could showcase complex, large-scale projects properly. Custom post types for case studies mean every project gets its own properly structured page, with consistent layout and clean URLs that search engines can index. As Ellipsis completes more projects and publishes more articles, the site compounds in value – each piece of content adding to the search footprint rather than sitting in a blog that never gets found.
That is the practical argument. The other argument is simpler: the site now looks like what Ellipsis actually is. That matters.
