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Case study

Living Giving

A new South African business needed a website that made an unfamiliar service feel clear, credible and worth booking.

living-giving-website.vercel.appLive site
The Living Giving home page on a laptop: a cream page with the large serif headline “Homes that stand strong, live lightly & give back”, a short summary and a Book a home assessment button.
Client
Living Giving
Industry
Ecological home transformations
What we did
Website design, Development, Content structure, Enquiry handling
Year
2026

The challenge

What was not working.

Living Giving turns gardens and outdoor spaces into indigenous, food-growing, water-wise ecosystems, brings in trusted specialists for solar and water, and puts part of every project back into community gardens. That is several ideas at once.

A new business does not get long to explain itself. A visitor who cannot tell within a few seconds whether this is a landscaper, a solar installer or a charity leaves without asking.

And it was launching without a track record to point to: no finished projects of its own to photograph yet. The site had to earn a first enquiry on clarity alone.

Our approach

What we decided to do.

We built the story in the order a homeowner asks it: what you do, what it changes, how it works, what it costs, how to start. Each of the six services got its own section, so nobody has to decode a single all-in-one pitch.

The design is calm and botanical — a serif headline face on a warm cream ground — because the service is about patience and living things. Motion is spent only where it carries meaning: the manifesto fills in as you read it, the services travel past on one pinned track, and the logo draws itself.

Honesty is built in rather than added. Where photographs are illustrative the gallery says so on the page, and the contact form tells a visitor exactly which field to fix instead of failing silently.

What we built

Every piece, and why it is there.

Six pages, in the order a homeowner decides
Home, About, Services, Gallery, Pricing, Contact. Each page answers the question the one before it raises.
One section per service, with a sticky index
Someone who arrived for food gardens should land on food gardens, not scroll past five other offers to find it.
A before-and-after card and a five-step process
Assess, design, build, connect, check. An unfamiliar service gets a lot less risky once you can see what happens next.
A gallery filtered by theme, and labelled honestly
It shows what is possible while saying, on the page, that the images are illustrative until the first projects are photographed.
An enquiry form that validates on the server
Province, enquiry type and a South African phone format are checked before anything is sent, and errors are named field by field.
A fallback when email delivery fails
If the message cannot be sent, the visitor is given the phone number and email address instead of a dead end.
A hidden honeypot field
Automated submissions are dropped quietly, without asking a real person to solve a puzzle.
Structured data, a sitemap and a robots file
Search engines can read the business as a home-and-construction service, and the pricing questions as an FAQ.

Pages

  • Home
  • About
  • Services
  • Gallery
  • Pricing
  • Contact

Built with

  • Next.js
  • Tailwind CSS
  • Motion
  • Resend
  • Vercel

Screens

What it looks like on a laptop and a phone.

The transformation section: a heading “From ordinary space to living ecosystem” over two cards, a dry empty lawn marked Before and a planted garden marked After, each with what changed listed underneath.
The transformation, in one card. The whole service, explained without a paragraph.
The Services page: a sticky index of six services on the left, and the first service, Ecological Gardens, with a photograph and what it includes.
Services, with an index that stays put. Six offers, and you can always see where you are.
The Gallery page: theme filters above a grid of garden, wildlife and food-growing photographs, under a note that the images are illustrative.
The gallery, filtered by theme — and saying plainly that its photographs are illustrative for now.
  • The Living Giving home page on a phone: the headline, the summary and the Book a home assessment button, stacked.
    The home page on a phone, where most first looks happen.
  • The How It Works section on a phone: the heading “From first visit to lasting impact” and the first step, Assess, on a vertical timeline.
    The five-step process on a phone, one step at a time.

Results

What changed, and where the number came from.

Every figure names its source. A number without one is not a result, it is a claim.

Lighthouse performance, desktop
99Source: Lighthouse 12.8.2, home page, desktop preset, 14 October 2026
Best practices and SEO
100Source: Lighthouse 12.8.2, home page, mobile and desktop, 14 October 2026
Built on
Next.jsSource: Response headers on the live site name Next.js on Vercel, 14 October 2026

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