Case study
Heritage Masonry Scotland
Most trades websites shout. This client teaches stonemasonry at the Scottish Lime Centre and repairs listed buildings for structural engineers, so the site is built like the thing their audience already trusts: a conservation record.
- Sector
- Conservation stonemasonry
- What we did
- Positioning, web design and build, site copy
- Year
- 2026
The brief.
Heritage Masonry Scotland repairs pre-1920 Scottish buildings the way they were originally built: breathable lime mortar and matched stone instead of the cement patching that traps moisture and destroys stonework. Their customers range from anxious tenement owners standing in front of a damp wall to conservation architects who need evidence, not adjectives.
The category default is a navy-and-orange template with a FREE QUOTE banner. We deliberately did not build that. The design treats every project photograph as a captioned plate, the building, the work, the material, because for this audience, documentation is the trust signal.
What we did.
- Opened with the argument, not the ad.
The site starts by explaining why cement suffocates old stone and lime does not. If the visitor learns something in the first minute, the firm has already proven it knows more than the last builder who quoted.
- Treated photographs as plates.
Real projects: schools, New Town terraces, rubble walls and bridges, each captioned with what was done and in what material, the way a survey report would do it.
- Wrote the contact page in the customer's voice.
It does not say Request A Quote. It says tell us what the wall is doing, because that is the sentence every worried owner is already carrying around.
What shipped.
- Positioning and full site copy
- Documentation-led design with captioned project plates
- Accreditations presented as a register, not a badge strip
- Service pages for stone masonry, lime works and cleaning
- A contact flow built around describing the problem
What it does now
The result reads like the practice's own record of work, which is exactly what a conservation architect wants to find and exactly what calms a worried owner down. It positions a firm with 25 years behind it as what it genuinely is: specialists who teach this trade, not a general builder with a cement mixer.