Elijah ShortWeb Design

Case study · Taranaki

FORM by Terry Clegg

Award-winning residential builders. The long relationship, and what looking after a site actually looks like year to year.

  • What they do Architectural and residential building across Taranaki
  • What I do Ongoing design, content and maintenance work on the site, plus hosting and support
  • Visit formbyterryclegg.co.nz
A section of the FORM by Terry Clegg site showing four Master Builders House of the Year 2026 award medallions above a heading about personal service and fixed pricing, beside a photograph of Terry and Mary-Lu Clegg.
The 2026 awards band and the section below it. This is the part of the page that changes every August as the House of the Year results come in.

The situation

FORM's site has the opposite problem to a technical consultancy. There is very little to explain and a great deal to show, so the photography has to carry the page and the layout has to get out of its way.

It also has to change every year. Every August the House of the Year results come in, and the site needs the new quality marks, the new project pages and the new photography, in the right order, quickly, while it's news.

The FORM by Terry Clegg home page on a laptop screen: a wide photograph of a gabled cedar and white architectural house behind the heading 'Our home. Your home.', with 'See our work' and 'Build your dream' buttons, and the start of the 'Crafted with precision. Recognised for excellence.' awards band below.
The home page. The awards band immediately under the hero is the part that gets rebuilt each year as new quality marks arrive.

What I did, in the 2026 round

  • Added the 2026 House of the Year quality marks across the home page, the awards page and both project pages, in the order Mary-Lu specified: top award first, then down.
  • Chased down the two assets that weren't on file. The Top 100 mark arrived as a zip of five variants, only one of which matched the 414 by 414 pixel format of the existing marks.
  • Web-sized the new group photograph from 1499 by 1000 pixels and 1.0 MB down to 1200 by 800 and 156 KB before it went anywhere near the site.
  • Found and fixed a set of column flags in the existing markup that had been wrong since before I touched it, while I was in there anyway.
  • Checked all five changed pages at desktop width and at 390 pixels.
  • Logged the whole job to the minute, including the two saves I had to redo after the page builder silently overwrote them, rather than quietly folding that time into the invoice.

The detail worth telling

The About page needed a new group photograph swapped in. The frame it was going into was set to 4:3, and the new photo was 3:2, so dropping it straight in cropped the sixth person off the right-hand edge. I changed the frame to match the photo instead of cropping the person.

Nobody would have complained. Most people wouldn't have noticed for a year, and by then it's just how the page looks. That is the entire argument for having one person who knows the site rather than whoever is free that week.

The other thing worth saying about this one is unglamorous: Mary-Lu forwards me domain renewal notices to ask whether they're a scam. She gets an answer the same day, and it costs nothing. That's what "someone to ring" means in practice.

What they got

The year's awards on the site within days of the results landing, across every page that mentions them, in a consistent order. A photo frame that fits the photo. And an itemised invoice for one and three-quarter hours.

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Site gone stale?

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