Case study · Sandstone masonry · Narrabeen
A licensed stonemason in Narrabeen whose old site had been told not to appear in search. The rebuild gives every kind of stonework its own page, shows 84 real job photos, and answers the questions people ask before they ring.
The 2019 WordPress site had a home page, About, Contact and a couple of portfolio entries, with no page for any individual service and a setting that kept it out of search results. For a trade found by people typing "sandstone retaining wall Northern Beaches" or "sandstone fireplace", that meant the site brought in nothing.
The owner supplied 94 new photos. The site had to put them in front of people, sorted by service, without slowing the page down, and answer the questions people ask before they call a stonemason: do I need council approval, what drives the cost, should I seal sandstone, will it survive a saltwater pool.
Every job is quoted in writing after a site visit, so there are no prices on the site. The cost pages explain what drives the price instead.
The colours come from the material itself: dark charcoal like wet basalt or a shadowed stone wall, a warm sandstone gold, and a pale stone cream in place of white.
#1d1c1a
Charcoal 900
Dark sections, the footer and the hero scrim #2c2a27
Charcoal 800
Headings and button borders #d4a650
Sandstone 500
Accent: focus rings, nav underlines, stat rules #e3c07a
Sandstone 400
Accent on dark backgrounds: icons and tick marks #f1e4c9
Sandstone 200
The "serving" band and soft highlights #8a5a17
Sandstone 700
Small gold text on cream, contrast-safe #22201d
Ink
Body text #fbf8f2
Background
Stone cream, with #f3ede1 for alternating sections The gold is split into light and dark versions on purpose: the light tones only ever sit on charcoal, and the darker #8a5a17 is used wherever gold text sits on cream, so small text keeps WCAG AA contrast.
Headings
Fraunces
A variable serif with soft, slightly chiselled letterforms that suits a craft trade working in a traditional material. Self-hosted, subset to Latin, about 31 KB.
Body text
System UI
San Francisco, Segoe UI or Roboto: one font file to download for the whole site, and that one is the headings.
The H1 scales fluidly from 2.15rem to 3.75rem, and a Georgia fallback resized to Fraunces' metrics means the page does not shift as the font loads.
A circle, triangle and square with spaced capitals. Only a 2019 bitmap existed, so it was redrawn as vector, every glyph fitted to the original artwork, and inlined as SVG with no image request.
Each service page opens with an "In short" answer, then what is built, the options, the process step by step, what affects the cost, approvals, a gallery, related projects, FAQs and guides.
84 photos grouped by service with sticky, deep-linkable category chips, a caption on every tile, and a viewer that shows the thumbnail at once and never jumps while the full image loads.
Number plates, house numbers and faces blurred, all location data stripped, and every photo re-checked against the stone actually used. A fireplace that turned out to be limestone was renamed.
A fixed call and free-quote bar on phones, a full-screen menu, compact horizontal service cards, and a heavier hero scrim where the headline sits over a busier part of the photo.
A 3px sandstone focus ring on everything interactive, FAQ questions as real headings in native accordions, a text label on the review stars, and visible form labels.
Hand-written PHP 8 with no CMS, database or framework. Services, projects, guides, FAQs and areas live in structured files, so one source drives the page copy, the structured data, the sitemap and llms.txt.
A build step produces AVIF from 480 to 2000px and WebP fallbacks under a per-pixel size budget, with sizes matched to the real rendered width at every breakpoint.
The other four hero photos stay hidden until a couple of seconds after load and the slow zoom only starts then, so nothing competes with the largest paint.
About 2.9 KB of critical CSS inline, the rest in one stylesheet; the whole home page HTML is about 29 KB over the wire.
The quote form replies straight to the customer and stops spam with a signed time token, a honeypot, an origin check, a link filter and a rate limit. Calls and emails are tracked by page.
The rating and latest reviews are fetched on the server and cached, shown unfiltered with initials instead of photos.
An automated crawl checks every page, every internal link and every old URL's redirect before anything goes live.
Two regional pages instead of dozens of thin suburb pages, titles that lead with the service and the place, and content shaped as answers.
An "In short" summary tops every service page, and four guides cover retaining wall approval, retaining wall cost, sealing sandstone and sandstone around saltwater pools, each with a checklist, FAQs and sources.
Name, hours and service area match the Google Business Profile, and the site explicitly separates the business from a similarly named stone care company, so Google and AI assistants do not mix them up.
The licence class is on the site, and the copy stays within it: where a wall needs engineering, the stonework is built to the engineer's design alongside the licensed contractor.
Every known legacy address was tested at launch: the four existing pages kept their URLs, 87 old URLs redirect in one hop to the nearest new page or photo, and WordPress system paths return 410 Gone.
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@graph": [
{ "@type": "HomeAndConstructionBusiness" },
{ "@type": "Service" },
{ "@type": "Article" },
{ "@type": "CreativeWork" },
{ "@type": "ImageGallery" },
{ "@type": "FAQPage" },
{ "@type": "BreadcrumbList" }
]
}Lighthouse figures: mobile, live home page, measured 19 October 2026 (a single run; scores vary slightly between runs). Page and image counts are from the live sitemap.
People search for a specific job, such as a sandstone retaining wall, crazy paving or a sandstone fireplace, not for "stonemason". The old site had no service pages at all, so NGN built ten, each at a short keyword URL with its own photos, process, cost factors, approvals and FAQs.
Every photo was checked at full size before publishing. Number plates, house numbers, faces and a phone number were blurred, phone screenshot bars were cropped off, and all EXIF data, including the GPS location of clients' homes, was stripped in the image build.
Stonework varies too much with access, stone type, height and drainage to publish set prices, and the business quotes every job in writing after a free site visit. Each service page and the retaining wall cost guide explain what drives the price instead, which answers the question honestly and gives search and AI engines something specific to quote.
Dozens of near-identical suburb pages are thin content that Google's spam policies target. The site has one page for the Northern Beaches and one for the North Shore, each listing the suburbs and councils served, and the structured data names the seven council areas.
The rating and latest reviews are fetched on the server and cached, then rendered as plain HTML, so the visitor's browser loads nothing from Google. Reviewer photos are replaced with initials, and the rating is shown as text rather than review markup, which businesses may not self-publish.
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We have used Next Generation Networks for several custom solution projects that went well beyond the standard scope listed on their website. Every time, the team has been exceptional—genuinely enthusiastic about tackling complex challenges and consistently delivering solutions that exceed…
James Johnson
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Great job updating our webpage and always very helpful.
Yvonne Barnes
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The best, love these guys!!!
Pro Wet & Dry
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Great internet and phone service, excellent customer service.
Fiori Mercuri
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Our network dropped during peak hours. NGN redesigned our infrastructure with automatic failover redundancy after-hours with zero downtime. Flawless stability ever since!
Portia Goldstien
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