Down To Groundworks

Down To Groundworks (DTG) has been a groundworks and civil engineering contractor since 2012. They work under main contractors such as Balfour Beatty, Colas, VolkerStevin and Knights Brown on roads, ports, airside and infrastructure schemes across London and the South East. I designed and built them a new website to replace their WordPress site, and moved it to new hosting without interrupting their email.

DTG’s buyers are procurement and contracts managers at main contractors. Before they pick up the phone they want to see scope, named schemes and the accreditations that get a subcontractor through pre-qualification. DTG were happy with their wording, so the job was to keep every published word and present it properly, and to launch without a long review on their side.

Before designing anything I audited DTG’s old site and studied how established brands solve the same problem: making a serious business look capable at a glance.

• The old site, fault by fault — I logged 13 problems before design began. They included pinch-zoom switched off on every page, WordPress attachment pages showing up in Google, a postcode that didn’t match their Google listing, no structured data or share image, and a washed-out pink link colour that failed contrast.
• Colour from evidence — I sampled the red from the logo’s own pixels (#E02828) and checked it against the old site’s theme colour (#E1282E). They matched, so the red stayed and the pink went.
• Leading brand websites — I researched the design systems behind leading brand websites to find one that fitted DTG’s brief of hard edges and solid shapes, then built theirs from it.

The structure came out of that research. Every colour and font was set for DTG, and the finished system passed a design-system linter with no errors.

• Structure — 2px corners on everything, no shadows or gradients, hairline rules instead of floating cards, near-black bands cut sharply against white, and a small red square marking labels and cards.
• Colour — charcoal, white and a concrete grey carry the page. Signal red is kept for calls to action. A deeper red (#B81C22, 6.6:1 on white) is used for red text and links. Every pairing was checked for contrast.
• Type — Saira Condensed in capitals for headings, in the style of road signs and plant livery, which keeps the bold headings DTG liked. IBM Plex Sans for reading, and IBM Plex Mono for labels, durations and phone numbers.

• Designed and built end to end — the design system above, built as a hand-made static site. All 23 pages are generated from one source file, with no framework and no plugins to keep updated.
• Their words, unchanged — every page carries the copy DTG had already published, so they approved the build in one pass with nothing new to check. The only new text is a privacy notice, which the law requires once a form collects personal details.
• The proof up front — 15 project pages with the client and scope of each scheme, seven sectors, 16 client logos and seven accreditations, all shown with DTG’s own site and drone photography. No stock images.
• Found by search and AI — clean page addresses, a title and description for every page, contractor structured data, a sitemap, a robots.txt that lets search and AI crawlers in, and an llms.txt. Every old WordPress address redirects to its new page. The site scored 90 out of 100 in my SEO audit before launch.
• A simple enquiry form — no CAPTCHA to fight with, a hidden spam trap instead, and no cookies or tracking, so there’s no cookie banner either.
• A careful move — new hosting, HTTPS, and the switch of the domain, with their Microsoft 365 email checked before and after. 35 automated checks pass on the live domain.

Live at downtogroundworks.co.uk since 29 October 2026. A quick, plain-spoken site that shows main contractors what DTG has built and who for, in DTG’s own words, with a way to get in touch on every page.