Same family, different jobs
The Gadd Group runs several businesses under one roof. This year I built websites for two of them, and they couldn't be more different.
GKD Tourism & Asset Management offers outsourced operations management and guest-facing maintenance for land-based tourism, visitor accommodation and managed assets. It sells to owners, operators and government bodies, and the offer takes some explaining.
Playscapes is the group's playground division. It designs and builds custom playgrounds and outdoor play spaces: timber forts and cubbies, synthetic turf, wet pour rubber, shade sails and playground furniture, plus project management and ongoing maintenance. It needs to show real built work and bring in enquiries from anywhere in Australia.
A template would have treated them the same. They aren't the same, so neither site is a template.
GKD: a site that does the explaining
I designed GKD from scratch in a warm palette of eucalyptus green, sandstone and burnt-ochre buttons. The client's feedback came in clear rounds, including a written feedback document that I worked through section by section. When they asked for imagery that felt more like a tourism product, I replaced the first round of photos and added director profiles to the About page.
Structure did most of the work. I split the offer into four services: Lead, Operate, Maintain and Sustain. This week each one got its own page, so a buyer who only needs maintenance lands on a page about maintenance, with links to related reading and the other services.
That related reading is a Learning Centre of eight long-form articles, on topics like managed tourism, park financing, and seasonality and migration. They answer buyers' questions before they pick up the phone, and they give Google far more real content to find than a four-page brochure would.
Playscapes: let the photos do the selling
Playscapes had something better than any stock photo: 43 photos of its own builds. I went through every one and picked the best fit for each spot on the site, then went back and fixed the places where a card was showing the wrong kind of work.
The design had its own journey. I tried a distinct, editorial "nature" look first, then rebuilt the site to match gaddgroup.com: the same type, the same green, and the same top bar with phone, email and hours. Playscapes keeps its own domain, but visitors can tell straight away that it's part of the same business.
The photo file names said where each job was. So this week I added 11 location pages, one for every place with real job photos, from Toowoomba and Birtinya to Byron Bay and Drysdale. Each page only describes what its photos show. No made-up project counts, client names or dates.
The same care underneath
Different designs, same standards behind them. Both sites now:
- send enquiries through my shared mail service, straight to the right inbox
- keep the business's contact details in one place, so a change only has to be made once, and have privacy and terms pages
- have a private owner dashboard, added last month, showing traffic, enquiries and whether the site is up, without a third-party analytics account
- have had a fresh search tune-up, so every page tells Google clearly what it is and where it belongs
Why bespoke matters
For a specialised firm like GKD, the job is to make a complex offer easy to understand. For a builder like Playscapes, the job is to put real work in front of the people searching for it. Same group, two different jobs, so two different sites.
Your website should look like your business, not like everyone else who bought the same template.
You can read the full case studies for GKD Management and Playscapes, see more web design for Gold Coast businesses, or read how I approach website design and build. Custom doesn't have to mean expensive: every website package has a fixed price, and even the $400 Starter gets a custom design. If your business deserves a site built around it, let's talk.