Calgary Website Redesign: Elevating Prime Design's Online Presence
Prime Design Solutions had a WordPress site they were embarrassed to send people to: ten service pages carrying the same copy, links that 404'd, and 111 MB of photography search engines couldn't see.
- Client
- Prime Design Solutions Ltd.
- Location
- Calgary, Alberta
- Sector
- Residential & commercial design
- Scope
- Full rebuild, 8 pages
- Stack
- Astro, static, Cloudflare Pages
- Replaced
- WordPress, 13 pages
Six complaints, and what we found behind each one
Before quoting anything we downloaded all 13 pages of their old site and audited them. Every finding below is from that audit.
“It looked like a copy-pasted template.”
It was. The ten service pages were byte-identical apart from the title, two headings and the image list. The commercial tenant fit-out page pitched “bespoke residential new builds” and carried a heading for custom acreage homes.
“Some pages just didn't work.”
Four pages sat at capitalised filenames while the rest used lowercase or directory URLs, so any link with the wrong case returned a 404. One live, indexed URL carried a typo: /mutli-family/. Canonicals pointed at relative fragments instead of real URLs.
“We didn't get our money's worth.”
All 13 pages shipped with an empty meta description. The homepage title tag was a 478-character marketing paragraph. Three pages, including the homepage and contact page, had no H1 at all.
“We wanted something visual, not walls of text.”
Nearly all the photography loaded as CSS backgrounds and slider assets, so crawlers counted two images per page. A studio selling visual work had a portfolio that image search could not see.
“It was slow, and it was on WordPress.”
111.6 MB of uncompressed imagery across 73 files, nine of them over 8 MB each. The gallery page alone referenced 54.85 MB, more than twice the weight of the entire replacement site.
“We post our recent work to Instagram. Put it on the site.”
No feed existed. Their most current work lived somewhere the website never mentioned.
Same business. Same photography. Different website.
Measured against the old site, not against a feeling
- 0
- pages had no meta description
- 0%
- of images had no alt text
- 0 MB
- cut from the image library
- 0
- Instagram posts, synced automatically
Every page. Now all of them have one, clamped to 160 characters in code.
117 of 148 references. Where alt text existed it was often a filename like IMG-20230906-WA0005.
111.6 MB of PNGs became 23 MB, with WebP conversions shipped for every gallery rendering.
A scheduled job refreshes the feed every 14 days. Nobody has to remember to update it.
Top scores across the board, on mobile and desktop
- 0+
- Performance
- 0+
- Accessibility
- 0+
- Best practices
- 0+
- SEO
- 0/2
- Agentic browsing
Numbers come from our own audit of the previous site and from the shipped build. We don't quote traffic or ranking figures here, because the site is new and we'd rather show you what we can prove.
Five decisions that did most of the work
- 01
Cut 13 pages down to 8
Ten near-duplicate service pages collapsed into one services page covering all ten services in three groups: commercial, residential, multi-family. One canonical page to rank instead of ten competing with each other.
- 02
Built the site around the work
A 27-project gallery with 11 filters and multi-view carousels, on a dark gallery-style design the client chose from references. Thumbnails desaturated, project views in full colour.
- 03
Wrote what was missing
Hand-written alt text on every project, eight FAQ entries where the old site had none, and a tagline. Real named client testimonials kept; the leftover template ones on the About page dropped.
- 04
Wired Instagram into the build
The 14 most recent posts pull in automatically, with images, carousels and video all handled in a lightbox. Their newest work now shows up on the homepage without anyone touching the site.
- 05
Made the SEO basics unbreakable
Titles capped at 60 characters and descriptions at 160 in code, LocalBusiness and FAQ structured data, a real sitemap, and a 404 page. Not a checklist someone has to remember, a constraint the build enforces.
The parts you'd only notice if they stopped working
A website that looks good on launch day is the easy half. These are the choices that keep it good a year later.
A word the build refuses to ship
The client can't describe their work as “architecture” for licensing reasons. Rather than trusting proofreading, the build walks every string of site content and fails the build if the word appears. It cannot reach production by accident.
Instagram that doesn't rot
Instagram's CDN links are signed and expire within days, so hotlinking them breaks the page. The sync downloads each post's media into the repo, prunes what has aged out, and only commits and deploys when something actually changed.
No CMS to maintain
The old site meant a login, a theme and a plugin stack to keep patched. This one builds to static files. There is no admin panel to break, and no update that can take the site down at 2am.
Limits enforced in code
The old homepage title was 478 characters because nothing stopped it. Title and description limits now live in a helper every page runs through, so the regression that caused the problem can't recur.
What the client said
Irfan Khan co-founded Prime Design Solutions with his brother Imran in 2018. This is his unedited Google review.
"We got our website done by Ryze and were beyond happy with the level of care, attention to detail, and exceptional customer service. We have already recommended Ryze to multiple friends and will continue to do so. You will not be disappointed!"
Want this for your business?
Stuck with a website you don't want to send people to?
That's exactly where Prime started. Book a free consultation and we'll tell you honestly what's worth fixing and what's worth rebuilding.