A Sydney wealth advisory firm with a serious client base and a website positioned to compete with low-fee fintech. We rebuilt the digital presence into a distinct, editorial-grade asset — and surfaced the consultation path their high-net-worth visitors were actually looking for.
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Hartwell came to us already running a successful practice — strong referral pipeline, established client list, fifteen years of reputation. The problem wasn't the business. It was that the website had stopped reflecting what the business had become.
Generic stock photography, undifferentiated copy, and the same service list every other firm uses. A first-time visitor couldn't tell what made Hartwell different from a roboadvisor — let alone why they cost more.
Mobile load times of 4.8 seconds. Missing schema markup. No internal link architecture. Google could find the homepage but couldn't crawl the deeper pages where the real expertise lived.
The contact form was a generic "send us a message" with no acknowledgment of the kind of conversation a serious prospective client needs. Visitors who could afford the service had no obvious next step that matched their expectations.
Award badges, regulator logos, and "5-star Google reviews" treated as the main proof points. Right signals for a different kind of firm. For Hartwell's client base, the absence of restraint was the credibility problem.
The single strongest commercial asset — Hartwell's principal, his thirty-year track record, his stated philosophy on wealth — was relegated to a brief "About" page that read like a LinkedIn summary. The reason clients chose them was hidden.
Twelve weeks. Five workstreams running in parallel. The brief: don't redesign the website — re-state what the business is, and let the design follow.
Three weeks of brand work before any pixel was drawn. Stakeholder interviews, competitive audit of larger Sydney firms, articulation of the "wealth, considered" position. The word "considered" became the operating principle for every design decision after.
Custom Fraunces serif for display, Söhne sans for body, monospace metadata. No stock photography. Hand-set hierarchy. The kind of restraint that signals confidence without announcing itself.
The principal's story — track record, philosophy, what he believes about advice — was rebuilt as a long-form editorial section on the homepage. Not buried in About. The thing clients chose them for, finally visible.
The generic contact form replaced with a multi-step conversation: who you are, what you're trying to figure out, what you've tried. The form itself signals the seriousness of the engagement before a call is even booked.
Sub-second mobile load. Full schema (FinancialService, Person, Article). Clean internal linking. Core Web Vitals in the green band. The technical groundwork that lets the editorial work compound for years.
First-impression decisions match the actual business. Tyre-kicker enquiries dropped. Quality of intake conversations climbed.
Organic discoverability for considered wealth-advisory terms established within the first quarter post-launch. Compounding from there.
The new intake process saves time on both ends — Hartwell's principal arrives at every initial call already knowing what the conversation is about.
"We finally have a website that matches the conversations we want to be having. The first six months of enquiries have been our best in three years — same volume, much higher quality."
Principal · Hartwell & Co. — Sydney