Work / Client
A forty-year-old timber yard that now publishes its prices
Caldmore Timber, Arundel Street, Walsall. A working yard, workshop and sawing mill trading from the same postcode since 1985 — with a website that had stopped doing it justice.
The business
Caldmore Timber has opened the gates on Arundel Street every morning since 1985. Softwood, hardwood, sheet materials, carcassing, fencing and garden timber — plus a workshop and small sawing mill on site, which is the part most merchants don't have. They machine their own skirting, architrave and tongue and groove, which means they can match a profile from a 1930s house when nobody else will touch it.
Through an amalgamation with KJ Interiors they also install suspended ceilings and partitions nationwide, including at five major airports. So the business spans a walk-in trade counter and UK-wide commercial contracts — two very different customers arriving at the same website.
What wasn't working
The old site was hand-built and showing its age. Three things stood out.
- It didn't size correctly on a phone. The viewport instruction in the page code contained a typo —
intial-scalerather thaninitial-scale— so the line browsers use to lay a page out on mobile was silently ignored. For a business whose customers are standing in a van deciding where to buy timber, that is not a small thing. - It was keyword-stuffed. The top of the homepage carried a block of twenty-five search terms — "Bespoke Timber, Carcassing, Custom Timber, Door Frames…" — the sort of thing that worked in 2009 and has been a liability for over a decade.
- Forty years of substance was invisible. The mill, the profile matching, the airport contracts, the fact that someone in the workshop answers the phone — none of it came across.
There was also a domain problem. The business was trading online as caldmoretimber09ltd.co.uk — an address that is hard to say over the phone, impossible to spell out to a customer, and carries a company-registration suffix that means nothing to anyone buying timber.
At a glance
Sector
Timber merchant
Where
Walsall
Trading since
1985
Built on
WordPress
Shop
WooCommerce
Engagement
Ongoing
Why this one matters to me
Caldmore now publishes over a hundred prices on the open web, with no form to fill in first. That is the same argument this whole practice is built on — that being straight about what things cost is a competitive advantage, not a risk. It is a great deal easier to make that case to a client when you have watched it work.
The work
A new site, a new address, and the careful bit in between
Four strands, and the third is the one that decides whether the other three were worth doing.
01 · Website
Built around how people actually buy timber
- The price list, published. Over a hundred lines in the open, with a headline grid of the most-asked-for items — skirting, ply, carcassing, decking, MDF, logs. No enquiry form standing between a customer and a number.
- Four businesses separated cleanly. Timber products, cutting and sawing, bespoke machining, and trade and commercial — one yard, four reasons to arrive, each with its own route through the site.
- The mill made the headline. The workshop is the thing competitors can't copy. "Bring an offcut and we will tell you if we can match it" does more work than any amount of description.
- Forty years told properly. A timeline from the yard opening in 1985 through the mill, the KJ Interiors amalgamation and the airport contracts.
- Mobile first, genuinely. Built for someone checking a price on a phone in a van, with the phone number reachable from any point on the page and opening hours in the header.
- WooCommerce underneath, so products and prices are managed in one place by the people who know what is actually in the yard.
02 · Identity
A tidy-up, not a rebrand
A forty-year-old name in Walsall does not need reinventing. It needed sharpening so it holds up at small sizes and on a screen.
- The wordmark redrawn and paired with a simple grain mark that works as a favicon and a profile picture
- A single green fixed across the site, the logo and the social profiles, so it is the same colour everywhere
- Consistent artwork supplied at the sizes each platform actually wants
The brief was deliberately conservative. Customers who have used the yard for thirty years should still recognise it.
03 · Migration
Moving to caldmoretimber.com without losing the ground already won
This is the part that goes wrong most often, and the part nobody sees when it goes right. Forty years of trading builds up search visibility, links and bookmarks attached to the old address. Move carelessly and you hand all of it back.
- Every old page mapped to its closest match on the new site before launch, rather than pointing everything at the homepage
- A shorter, sayable domain — one you can give over the phone without spelling it
- Search Console and analytics set up on the new property so there is a baseline to measure against
- Rankings and traffic watched week by week through the changeover, not checked once and forgotten
04 · Social & promotion
Somewhere to put what happens in the yard
A timber yard produces good material every week without trying — a matched moulding, a load going out, a finished fit-out. It had nowhere to go.
- Profiles brought in line with the new identity and pointed at the new domain
- A simple, repeatable posting pattern the yard can keep up without a marketing department
- Monthly offers surfaced on the site and in social together, so the two support each other
- Google Business Profile aligned with the new address and hours — for a local trade, often the highest-value listing there is
Measurement
What gets tracked, and what gets claimed
Three questions are asked of this account every month: are enquiries and calls going up, is the yard visible for the terms that actually matter in Walsall, and are the customers arriving better qualified than before.
Search Console and analytics were set up as part of the build, so there is a proper baseline rather than a guess. The reporting goes back in plain English — what was done, what it moved, what is next.
What you won't find on this page is a percentage. Client numbers get published when they are the client's to share and solid enough to stand behind, and not a moment before. Anyone quoting you a figure inside a fortnight is quoting you a coincidence.
Independently verifiable
4.6 / 5
from 29 Google reviews — the yard's own reputation, earned over forty years
Those ratings belong to Caldmore Timber and reflect four decades of trading, not a website. They are here because a genuine reputation is worth surfacing, not because we claim credit for it.
Something similar in mind?
If you run an established business whose website undersells it — or you are moving to a better domain and are nervous about losing what you have built — that is the work I most enjoy. Half an hour on the phone, free, and I will tell you honestly whether it is the right spend.
