Who built our website, and how they went about it
The same straight approach we take to decorating, applied to the website you are reading.
The same straight approach we take to decorating, applied to the website you are reading.
Straight Edge Decorating was set up to take the guesswork out of hiring a decorator: a clear price in writing, a start date we keep and a tidy finish at the end. We wanted a website that worked the same way. We asked MyDiro Digital, a web studio here in Staffordshire, to build it, and they still look after it for us. This page explains what they did, because we think you should know how the site you are reading was put together.
Any decorator will tell you a finish is only as good as the preparation underneath it, and a website is no different. MyDiro planned ours around three things: the services we offer, the towns we work in, and the questions people tend to ask before they ask for a quote. That plan became the structure of the site.
Interior decorating, exterior painting, landlord and commercial work, wallpapering, woodwork and trim, and kitchen and spray finishing each have their own page. Stoke-on-Trent, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Stone, Trentham and Kidsgrove each have a page too. The advice section answers four common questions, from what it costs to paint a room to whether spraying kitchen doors beats replacing them.
Vague pricing is one of the things people dislike most about hiring a decorator, so the site does not hide ours. The homepage lists typical guide prices, such as from £180 to repaint a box room or from £600 for a kitchen cabinet respray, and every service page shows a starting price or explains how that kind of job is priced. Each one says plainly that it is a guide, and that your written quote is the fixed figure you actually pay.
Many people will be reading this on a phone, perhaps standing in the room that needs doing. So asking for a quote is kept short: your name, a phone number, your town, the kind of job and a few words about it. Email is optional. If you would rather send photos, the WhatsApp button sits in the corner of the screen, and our number is one tap away in the footer. The form also carries a hidden trap for spam robots, which keeps junk out of our inbox.
A decorator's website stands or falls on whether you trust the finish. So the service pages do more than list what we do. Each one walks through our preparation process step by step, from protecting the room and making good the surfaces to the final coats and the tidy-up, because that is the part of the job you never see in a photo. The homepage shows a kitchen transformation as a before and after, and the Our Work page is set up so new photos can be added as jobs are finished.
They also turned our logo into a full set of icons, so the site looks like Straight Edge whether it is open in a browser tab, saved to a phone's home screen or shared in a message.
A website is no use if the people down the road cannot find it. MyDiro set the site up so search engines can read it properly. Every main page is listed in a sitemap, the site is verified with Google Search Console, and the service, town and advice pages carry structured information describing who we are, what we do and where we work. Nobody can promise a place on Google, but the groundwork has been done properly.
The site is made of plain pages with no website builder or plug-ins underneath, hosted on Netlify. That keeps things simple and leaves less to go wrong. To check the site is doing its job, MyDiro set up visit counting that uses no cookies and no advertising trackers. It counts page visits and the moments that matter to us, like a tap to call, a WhatsApp message or a quote request, without trying to work out who you are.
A website is not a job you finish and walk away from. Since the first version went up, MyDiro have added our icons, a full sitemap, Search Console and the visit counting, and they keep an eye on how the site is running. That leaves us free to get on with the decorating.
We wanted a website that was straight with people, the same way we try to be. MyDiro gave us exactly that, and we are grateful. If you run a local business in Staffordshire and need a website, we are happy to recommend them.
Tell us about your project and we'll send a clear, written price within 24 hours — or send photos over WhatsApp.