Profit Pays

The brief

ProfitPays manages cost and risk on construction projects where being wrong is expensive, so what it sells is rigour, and that set the brief before a word of it was written. The site had to feel as exact as the work without burying a buyer in the technical language the work is made of.

We came in at the idea stage and stayed to launch, so structure and design were decided together rather than one fitted around the other.

Structure

Nobody wakes up wanting BIM management; they want a project that does not overrun. So the services are organised the way a client experiences a project, rather than the way a consultancy organises its departments. Each service is a page in its own right, with room for the sectors it serves and a route to a consultation.

The home page does one job above all others: say what the business is for, in the client's own words, before the visitor has to guess.

The content system

Seven services, no two the same shape. A rigid template forces every one into a mould that fits none of them; an open page builder hands over the ability to break the design on any given Tuesday.

So the pages are composed from a library of designed section types in ACF Flexible Content, stacked in any order, each arriving already correct in spacing, type scale, colour and responsive behaviour. Layout choices belong to the client. The design system does not.

• A library of designed section types in ACF Flexible Content, composed per page.
• A custom post type and template for services, where the system does its heaviest lifting.
• Spacing, type scale, colour and responsive behaviour fixed in the section, not in the editor.

A new service, sector or campaign page is an afternoon in the CMS, not a change request to us.

The build

The same component set runs across the whole site, stacked differently on every page, so the pages read as a set without reading as a template.

Built for the people who run it

A note on the screens in this section: the client's data is private, so it is blurred. The admin's own interface is left readable.

The site has a second audience that never sees the front end: the team at ProfitPays who keep it up to date, none of them developers. They edit the pages, the home page's modules, the testimonials, the FAQs, the menus and the business's global details on their own, so the admin was designed with the same care as the site.

Every kind of content has its own place in the menu: Services, Solutions, Team Members, Projects, News & Insights, Testimonials, FAQs, Careers and Clients, each a post type with its own fields, beside the pages and one entry for the content the whole site shares. Whoever opens the admin finds a testimonial under Testimonials and a project under Projects, without needing to know how the site is built.

• Flexible Content for the pages that grow. Service and project pages are built from sections the editor stacks in any order, each with its own choice of content, so a new page is assembled rather than coded.
• Options pages for what's shared. Global content and its layout controls each have one place in the admin: edited once, used everywhere.
• Elementor, joined to ACF. The client asked for a visual builder, for total freedom with as little complexity as possible. Custom code connects ACF's fields to Elementor, so content is entered once, in a form, and the design picks it up.
• Proofed against mistakes. Instructions beside the fields, sensible defaults and conditional logic that shows only what applies, so each form explains itself and a wrong choice is hard to make.

I also recorded explainer videos to walk the team through it.

The test came after launch: the client has never asked us to change their content, only for visual and logic changes — the work that should come to a developer.

End to end

Positioning, structure, design, front end and back end: one team from the blank page to the live site, with nothing to renegotiate at a handover between agencies.

What was handed over is the part that decides whether a site is still good in three years: a content system the client operates without us, and a design system that holds its shape no matter what they build with it. Neither depends on our being available, which is the point of building it this way rather than the fast way.

The site is live at profitpays.com, and its projects index is the quickest way to see the system working: the same sections, a different shape on every entry.