A beautiful next generation for Burstows
The current website has done its job of holding the words and the photographs. The new one keeps every one of those words and puts them somewhere Burstows owns, that your own team can run, and that Google can actually read.
Good morning Michelle,
I've put this together so you and Don can walk through the new website at your own pace, without me talking over the top of it. Each section answers one question, and every number in it comes from one of three places: the site as it stands today, Google's own record of how people find Burstows, and the build we've made so far.
The short version is this. The current site holds the words and photographs in a way that needs a designer every time something moves, and across all ninety of its pages it has never once told Google what a page is about. The new site is the same words your team wrote, on a platform in Burstows' name, with a content desk the media team can run themselves.
There's no rush on any of it. Have a read, and we'll talk it through whenever suits. The last section has the investment, and the one before it has the part I'd most like your eyes on, which is the search traffic the current site is being shown for and quietly losing.
Warmest regards,
Ben
Three reasons, in plain terms
Who owns it
Today the site lives inside a Webflow account. Its files sit on Webflow's servers in the United States, and the PDFs families download, including the Funeral Pricing Information, are served from Webflow addresses rather than from burstows.com.au. If the subscription lapses or the terms change, the site goes with it.
The new site lives in accounts opened in Burstows' name: the code on GitHub, the hosting on Vercel, the content in Sanity. Rory holds the keys, and Yoonet works inside them rather than the other way round.
Who can change it
Webflow keeps the words and the layout tangled together, so moving a paragraph is a design job. The new site keeps them apart. Each of the 85 services, facilities, guides, news posts, resources and urns is its own record with a handful of fields, and the layout is applied once.
Change a service description and every place it appears changes with it. Add a news post and it is on the site in about a minute, without anyone opening a design tool.
What Google can see
Across 90 pages, the current site has no page descriptions, no canonical tags, no structured data and no social sharing images, and 375 of its images carry no alt text. Google is writing your search snippets for you, and often choosing the wrong words. Your contact page was shown 110,152 times in three months and clicked 300 times. The new site fixes those foundations on every page, and the Search section shows exactly where the traffic is leaking today.
The homepage, side by side
The current homepage floats four buttons over a photograph and repeats the same links in eight menu blocks. The new one answers the one question a visitor arrives with, attend, arrange or plan ahead, and puts the phone number and the webstream link above everything. Every photograph is one your team already had.
On the left is burstows.com.au today, on the right is the new site. Drag the handle to compare them.
What changes, by the numbers
What stays exactly the same
- Every word on every page. Presentation changed, the writing did not.
- The phone number, (07) 4636 9600, now on every page at every screen size.
- The Tribute Centre, Currently in Our Care and the client webstream page, with the Firehawk embeds untouched.
- Google Tag Manager, so your reporting continues without a gap.
- All 13 services, 16 facilities, 26 news posts, 15 arranging guides and 5 support articles.
- Every PDF, now hosted on burstows.com.au rather than on Webflow's servers.