The Clear Group

Project Overview

The Clear Group is an insurance business that grows by acquisition, buying up other companies and bringing them in under the Clear umbrella. They'd taken on several new departments and the website hadn't kept up: the layout was dated, the structure was confusing, and there was a lot of content with no clear route through it. They needed a rebuild.

The site runs on Joomla (a content management system, similar in job to WordPress; it's the software that lets non-developers edit their own pages). The brief was to make a large, growing content set navigable, put a real person in front of each product, and give the marketing team somewhere to publish news.

How do you stop visitors getting lost?

Clear had enough products that dropping someone straight onto a content page would lose them. So most of the inner pages work as landing pages: they orient a visitor and point them onward, rather than trying to hold all the detail themselves. The content pages sit underneath, and that's where a visitor actually ends up.

The front page uses CSS animation (CSS is the code that controls how a page looks, as opposed to what it says) for the slider and the hover panels. Each section also carries its own image, tinted with a CSS gradient keyed to the content, so the site changes character as you move through it without needing a separate design built for every page.

The content pages and the specialist layer

The content pages use accordions (collapsible sections, so a long page stays readable) and custom shortcodes, which are small blocks of pre-set formatting the editors can drop in without touching any code. At the foot of each page, Clear surfaces the specialist for that product: the actual person responsible, with their details and a "call me back" option. A relevant case study sits alongside in a popup, so a visitor who wants more can get it without the page running on forever.

The Our People page

This was the biggest piece of the job. Clear have a lot of staff, spread across departments, and on the old site every one of them lived on a separate page. Moving that across by hand wasn't sensible.

So I wrote a script to pull the employee details off the old pages and compile them by department. It generated the formatted output ready to drop straight into the new site: name, role, phone number, a bit of bio, an email address worked out from each person's name, and the right photo matched by their initials. It wasn't fully hands-off; names with apostrophes and a few non-standard email addresses needed a manual pass. But it did the bulk of what would otherwise have been a long, dull copy-and-reformat job.

The photos were their own task. Everyone had a professional headshot taken (sent over to me, thankfully), but they came in as raw files: inconsistently framed, far too big for the web. So I set up a batch job to crop, resize, and export the lot. The site then displays them automatically, matched by name; anyone without a photo falls back to a default stored under their name, so swapping in a real one later is just an overwrite.

Adding a blog

Clear wanted a news section. Joomla doesn't ship with a proper blog, so that meant a third-party plugin, and none of the obvious ones worked as advertised (some didn't work at all). Working with a colleague, I found one that handled most of it and modified it to cover the gaps and match the site's styling.

What Clear ended up with

Clear came away with a site that matches how the business actually runs, with a real specialist attached to each product at the point a visitor might want to talk to someone. The content is navigable rather than a maze, the news section gives marketing somewhere to post, and the employee directory, which could easily have been a migration headache, now updates with a single file overwrite.