# Charnwood Coatings & Fabrication

> A complete website for a UKCA-marked structural steel fabricator established in 1985: a fast, content-rich site built to show real capability and turn enquiries into work. What they needed, what I built, the stack and the search work.

Canonical page: https://daveellis.dev/work/charnwood/
Made by Dave Ellis (Edinburgh, Scotland). Email: dave@daveellis.dev
Last updated: 2026-11-12

Case study: a complete website for Charnwood Coatings & Fabrication, a UKCA-marked structural steel fabricator.

## Charnwood Coatings & Fabrication.

A complete website for a UKCA-marked structural steel fabricator established in 1985, whose customers check them out online before they ever pick up the phone. Built to show real capability and turn enquiries into work.

## The brief

Charnwood do structural steel fabrication, bespoke metalwork and powder coating, and they have been doing it since 1985. The work is serious, the accreditation is real, and the people buying it are specifiers, contractors and fabricators who need to know a supplier is competent before they send a drawing.

That is a specific website problem. A buyer in that position is not browsing. They are checking: can this company handle the size of thing I need, do they hold the right marks, have they done work like mine, and are they close enough. If the site cannot answer those four questions quickly, the buyer goes back to the search results and asks somebody else.

So the job was not a brochure. It was a site that puts capability in front of the person checking, loads instantly on a phone on a building site, and gets found when somebody searches for the specific thing Charnwood actually do.

### At a glance

- **Client**: Charnwood Coatings & Fabrication
- **Sector**: Structural steel fabrication, bespoke metalwork and powder coating
- **Where**: Loughborough, Leicestershire
- **Established**: 1985
- **My role**: Developer: design and build, end to end
- **What it covers**: Capability pages, accreditation, project showcase, enquiry routes
- **Search work**: Technical SEO, structured data, performance, local and sector terms
- **Live at**: charnwoodps.co.uk

## What the site had to prove.

### Capability, not adjectives

Content-rich on purpose

Every fabricator's website says quality and bespoke. None of that helps somebody decide whether you can take their job. So the site is built around what Charnwood can actually do, said specifically: the processes, the materials, the finishing, the accreditation, the scale.

That is more content than a typical small business site carries, and it is deliberate. Specific pages answer specific searches, and a buyer who finds a page about the exact process they need has already been half convinced by the fact that it exists.

### Fast enough for a site visit

Performance as a feature

The person checking a supplier is frequently standing somewhere with one bar of signal. A heavy site with a slideshow and four tracking scripts is simply not available to them, and an unavailable site loses the enquiry to whoever loaded.

Built light, images sized and compressed properly, nothing loaded that is not needed to read the page. Performance here is not a score to brag about, it is whether the enquiry happens.

### Found for the real terms

Sector language, local intent

Nobody searches for a coatings and fabrication solutions provider. They search for the process, the material and the town. The copy and the page structure follow the words buyers in this trade actually use, with the local signals that matter for a business whose customers need steel delivered.

Structured data describes the business, the location and what it offers, so search engines and AI assistants can both state the facts correctly rather than guessing from a hero image.

## What was delivered

- A complete site, designed and built end to end. One person from first sketch to launch, which is why the detail survived.
- Capability pages covering the processes, the materials and the finishing, each able to stand on its own as a search landing page.
- Accreditation made visible, including the UKCA marking, because in this trade it is a qualifying question rather than a badge.
- Project showcase putting real work in front of buyers, which is the only form of proof that counts here.
- Enquiry routes that suit the buyer, whether that is a phone call from a van or a drawing attached to an email.
- Technical SEO and structured data throughout, with the performance work that makes it usable on a bad connection.

## Built with

- Hand-built front end
- Semantic HTML
- Responsive, mobile first
- Optimised imagery
- JSON-LD structured data
- Core Web Vitals
- Local search signals
- Accessible contrast

This was a website project of the kind described on the websites page, where the published starting price and what moves it are both written down.

Visit charnwoodps.co.uk

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