Gold Coast · seven-page build

TA Electrical GC

Built for one person: on a phone, at night, in a house with the power out.

At 390 pixels, which is the width this build was aimed at. Above 900 the bolt runs down between the words and the vans; below it, the same shape runs across the top of the band, so the motif survives the breakpoint instead of being dropped at it.

Steel grey and one amber, both sampled by pixel from his own logo rather than picked as a mood, over a canvas that is the logo's black lifted just off pure. The panel is cut by a bolt taken from that same logo, moved left across six rendered crops until the white van's grille cleared the edge.

The situation

What they were working with.

Tom Ashcroft trades as TA Electrical GC out of Merrimac, inland on the central Gold Coast. He registered the business in February 2021 and runs it as a sole trader with one apprentice, who came on board in 2024. That is the whole team, and it became a hard rule for the copy: the site never calls him a company, never says Pty Ltd, and never says our team of electricians.

He had no website. The domain was already his, already paid for and already running his email with nothing behind it, so pointing it at a site was a DNS change rather than a purchase. Everything else a stranger could find was social, and Facebook's login wall showed a logged-out visitor exactly one of his thirty recommendations. He had never published a suburb list, a set of business hours, or a current number of years on the tools.

The person the site has to win is a homeowner with an electrical problem, on a phone, often at night, sometimes standing in a house with no power. If the power is out the wifi is out, so page weight is a budget rather than a preference, and a full-white page at 11pm is physically unpleasant to look at. Merrimac sits ten kilometres inland from Surfers Paradise, which is why there is no beach anywhere on this site.

The decisions

Five calls, and why we made them.

Dark, because his own amber fails on white

Fifteen South East Queensland electricians' sites were characterised and seven of seven inspected were white, most with a corporate blue. His logo measures 81.7 per cent black, sampled by pixel from his own file rather than eyeballed, and his amber reads 1.93 to 1 on white, which fails the contrast floor outright. A light site meant darkening a client's own brand colour to get it past a checker. Dark meant using the colour off his van at full strength, as readable text, in a house with the lights out.

A seventh page nobody asked for

The brief was six pages. The seventh is a plain guide to Queensland's safety switch and smoke alarm rules, read against the Electrical Safety Regulation 2013 and the Fire Services Act 1990 rather than against other trade sites. Sections 84 and 85 give ninety days. A lot of published trade copy says three months for a sale and six for a rental, and somebody counting from a settlement date would be counting wrong.

The hero was a photograph for a few hours

A full-bleed photographic hero shipped one morning and came out the same afternoon, on his word: keep the main page black and put the vehicle pics on instead of behind the writing. A problem left with it, because carrying body text over a bright showroom shot had needed a measured veil. The CSS is kept, dormant, under a class nothing on the site now carries, because he is arranging a photograph of himself and his apprentice on a job. Bringing it back means re-running that contrast audit against the new frame.

No suburb list, because he does not work off one

Twenty templated suburb sections would have been easy, and would have been doorway spam, which Google names in its own policy. He had never published a list anywhere, and when asked he said he services pretty much anywhere on the Gold Coast, not specific suburbs. So the page says exactly that, and answers do-you-come-to-me with a hand-drawn map naming the two places he named himself. It stops at the state line, because a Queensland contractor licence does not by itself cover work in New South Wales.

Free quotes came off the home page three times out of four

It sat in the credentials strip, in a Why card and in the domestic copy, and it is almost certainly true. It is also the one line on that page nobody could source, because he has never published it anywhere we could find. That strip is reserved for things a customer can ask to see. The hero's Get a free quote button stayed, so the offer is still made once, as an action rather than a claim.

The scope

What is actually in it.

The machinery

A form that cannot fake a send: The enquiry form posts to a serverless handler that revalidates every field, mails him through a transactional sender, and sets reply-to to the customer so pressing reply answers the person who wrote in. A failed send retries once, writes the whole submission to the log, and returns a visible failure carrying his phone number. It never says thanks for something it did not deliver.
The number never leaves the screen: On a phone a call bar sits across the bottom of every page. It is visible by default and hides only while the hero's own call button is on screen, so if the code that hides it never runs, the number is still there. It stays live with the menu open too, because someone who opened the menu and then just wants to ring should be able to.
A counter that retires itself: The countdown to 1 January 2027 ships hidden and appears only while that date is still ahead, computed from a fixed Brisbane offset because Queensland has no daylight saving. The prose beside it is written to read correctly on both sides of the date, so on the day the counter stops appearing and nothing needs editing.
Everything points at his own domain: Canonical, Open Graph and JSON-LD all name taelectricalgc.com, with a hand-written sitemap of the seven real routes and a robots file that blocks nothing. The structured data declares an electrician with a postal address and a phone number, and carries no aggregateRating. Thirty-two references had to be rewritten the day the domain went live.
Nothing loads from anywhere else: Two self-hosted variable typefaces, seventy-seven kilobytes for the whole type system. No font CDN, no libraries, no third-party requests at all. The phone gets its own crop of the hero photograph, 72KB against 168KB, because serving it the desktop file meant fetching 1200 by 900 to paint 390 by 244.

The screens