DeaDecor

Context

A painting and decorating firm working in occupied homes, live offices, retail units and industrial buildings. Three services that don’t usually sit together: painting, retractable loft stairs and folding-door partitions.

The underlying problem in this trade is trust. Anyone can put two cheap coats on a wall; the difference is what happens before the tin is opened, and that is precisely what the client never sees and can’t compare on a quote.

Approach

• Show the invisible work. The before/after section isn’t there to show off a colour: it’s there to explain that the wall had damp, that it was treated, that it was primed with a stain-blocking product and that this is why the finish holds. The photo carries a technical argument rather than decorating the page.
• The process in four steps, with protecting furniture as a step of its own. In an occupied home, masking up properly is half the perceived service.
• A written, itemised quote as the single conversion. No calculator, no indicative price: the commitment is clarity in the quote, not a shop-window figure.
• Astro with Preact islands: only the interactive parts hydrate — the before/after slider, the menu, the form — and only once visible. The rest ships as static HTML.
• A high-contrast display serif over a brush-stroke orange, with the paint mark as the brand signature in the header.

What I built

• Static Astro architecture with Preact islands
• Design system in Tailwind 4 tokens via @theme
• Before/after comparison component, keyboard accessible
• A work catalogue organised by finish and by type of space
• Technical SEO with a home and construction business schema
• Legal pages and consent banner
• Full test suite: unit, E2E, accessibility, visual regression and Lighthouse CI
• Production deployment on the final domain

Outcome

Live since September 2026. My favourite piece is the mouldy wall: instead of a carousel of pretty finishes, there’s one ugly wall with the text explaining what was done and why painting straight over it would have lasted a single winter. It sells better than twenty catalogue shots.

A note on this work

Built at Xpandex, where I run the full cycle: design, development, performance, accessibility, technical SEO and deployment.