Local Business · Commercial Painting & Coatings
GP Coatings
A specialist coatings contractor working on some of New South Wales’ largest projects, with a website that read like a small painting business. The redesign started with an audit, not a mood board — most of what was wrong was structural.
- Client
- A specialist commercial painting and protective coatings contractor.
- Market
- New South Wales, Australia — working for tier one and two builders.
- Starting point
- A dated site with a three-slide hero, no services section and an uncategorised gallery.
- Scope
- Full redesign and rebuild: 19 pages, a projects system and a sector taxonomy.
- Extras
- Custom scroll animation, video hero, LinkedIn news feed, and a product line launched mid-project.
- Role
- Audit, information architecture, content structure, design, build and video direction.
The audit
We looked before we quoted.
Before any number was discussed, we went through the existing site as a visitor would and wrote down what was actually costing them work. Six problems came out of it, and only one was about how the site looked.
A three-slide hero carousel
Replaced with a single video hero and one clear statement. Rotating banners bury the message — most visitors never see slide two.
No services section on the homepage
The company had three core offers and a homepage that never listed them. Added a services block, then gave each one a full page of its own.
"Our Projects" was really industries
Renamed and split. Sectors became its own taxonomy, and past work moved to a properly categorised projects archive underneath it.
Service pages were walls of text
Rebuilt with structure, imagery and proof, so a builder scanning for intumescent experience finds it in seconds rather than paragraphs.
Nothing targeting the state they serve
With no page addressing New South Wales, the site could not rank for the searches that matter most to a contractor working across it.
A gallery with no categories
Every job in one mixed grid. Now filterable by sector, so an education client sees schools and a health client sees hospitals.
- 19
- pages rebuilt
- 9
- project case studies
- 12
- sectors, narrowed from 15
- 6
- service pages
The approach
Structure first, then the surface.
A contractor bidding on hospitals and schools is judged on credibility before aesthetics. The rebuild had to make the scale of the work legible — which is an architecture problem long before it is a design one.
-
Fix the structure before the styling
The audit came before the quote. Most of what was wrong was architectural — what existed, what it was called, and what was missing entirely — and no amount of visual polish fixes a homepage that never mentions the services.
-
Build a projects system, not a photo wall
Nine flagship projects, each with its own page, its own imagery and its own sector. Filterable by the twelve sectors the company works across, so the archive answers the question a specific builder came with.
-
Earn the motion
A video hero and a scroll-driven logo animation, built because the brand needed to feel like it belongs on major projects — not because animation is fashionable. Video served optimised so the effect does not cost load time.
Before & after
Same company, told properly.
Drag to wipe between the old site and the rebuild. The tell is in the details — a slider with arrows on either side, a serif headline, and a statistics band in six different colours.
The system
Nineteen pages that each answer something.
Not a homepage with a few children hanging off it. Services, sectors and projects each became a real section of the site, with its own landing page and its own set of details a builder can check before they call.
6 Services
Each with a page of its own, rebuilt from a wall of text.
- Premium Commercial Painting
- Intumescent Coatings
- Spray-Applied Finishes
- Protective Coatings
- Anti-Graffiti Coatings
- Epoxy Floor Coatings
12 Sectors
The taxonomy that used to be mislabelled “Our Projects”, narrowed from fifteen.
- Commercial
- Residential
- Education
- Hospitality
- Industrial
- Community
- Defence
- Arts & Culture
- Health & Aged Care
- Infrastructure
- Retail
- Sports & Recreation
9 Projects
Case studies with client, location and scope — filterable by sector.
- Westmead Children's Hospital — Dragonfly Car Park
- NSW Rugby Union Centre of Excellence
- Stella Maris College
- Marist Catholic College North Shore — Stage 2B
- Cabra-Vale Diggers Club
- Brookvale Oval
- Opal Care Marsden Park
- Clarion Alexandria
- Boronia Apartment
Careers
One enquiry form covering estimators, applicators and admin roles.
News
Fed automatically from the company's LinkedIn, so it stays current without anyone writing posts.
GP Pro Tools
A product line added mid-build, structured so it can become a shop without redoing the site.
The names are the point. A builder scanning for a contractor who has worked on a children’s hospital car park or a school stage-two fitout can now find that in one click, instead of guessing from an unsorted wall of photographs.
On the phone
Read on site, not at a desk.
Estimators and site managers check a contractor from a phone between jobs. The sector filters stay usable at thumb size, project pages keep their detail, and the video hero falls back gracefully rather than eating a mobile data plan.
What we delivered
The whole rebuild.
- 19 pages, rebuilt from the ground up
- Six dedicated service pages, one per offer
- Nine project case studies with their own pages and imagery
- Twelve sector categories used as filters across the projects archive
- Custom scroll-driven logo animation and a video hero
- Careers page with a single enquiry form covering every role
- News page fed automatically from the company's LinkedIn
- A product-line landing page added mid-build, structured to become a shop later
Where it landed
Live before Christmas.
- Launched ahead of the client's Christmas deadline
- A site that finally states the services on the homepage
- Every sector and service now has a page that can rank for it
- Project work presented as case studies rather than an unsorted gallery
Search performance for this one sits with the client. We would rather show the work than publish a number we cannot stand behind.
Why this one matters
Inspiration, not a copy.
The client shared a site they admired and asked for that feeling. Cloning it would have been quicker, and we said so plainly — along with why we would not do it. Copied designs put a brand in somebody else’s clothes and carry real legal risk, and the client had earned a site that looked like their own company.
So we took the principles — motion with intent, generous imagery, projects treated as evidence — and built them around what GP Coatings actually does. The same instinct applied to speed: when the ask was to delete images to load faster, the honest answer was that the images were not the problem.
Bigger than your website makes you look?
We start with an audit of what is actually costing you work, then rebuild the structure so the scale of what you do is obvious.