Talbot Jones Ltd
Website & Brand Evolution Case Study
Bringing a Chartered broker’s website up to the standard of the firm behind it.
THE CLIENT
Talbot Jones is a Chartered Insurance Broker in Gateshead, UK. Chartered status is awarded by the Chartered Insurance Institute to firms that meet its highest standards of professionalism and ethics. It puts them among the most trusted brokers in the country.
Their website didn’t look it. It was dated, flat in colour and inconsistent in how the brand was applied. It undersold a firm with real specialist depth in cyber, professional indemnity and trustee cover, and it wasn’t winning the clients they’re best at serving
Old Site
New Site
Design rationale
Credibility first. A Chartered broker asks clients to trust them with complex, expensive risk. If the website looks less considered than the advice, that trust takes a knock before the first conversation. Every design decision was measured against one question: does this look like a firm you’d trust with your business?
Bold colour in a dry sector. Insurance doesn’t have to look grey. We agreed a bolder palette with gradients, which gave the brand energy without losing its professional footing. It also fixed a quieter problem. Colours had drifted across the site and materials over the years, and the new palette gave everything one consistent system. I set the colours up as site-wide CSS variables, so the palette is applied the same way on every page and stays consistent as the site grows.
Sectors, not products. Wireframes were built around who Talbot Jones serves, not a long list of policies. A charity trustee and a tech founder land in different places, reading language that fits their world.
The build
A custom Squarespace build, extended with HTML and CSS where the platform’s standard tools fell short.
A custom mega menu that splits the site into sectors, products and services, so visitors find their route in one click.
One enquiry form, built once and loaded into every service page. Change it in one place and it updates everywhere.
A “Which sector are you in?” row on the homepage that gets visitors to the right page straight away.
Fully responsive, tested across desktop, tablet and mobile.
Customised categories and tag labelling with custom styling
Built to be found
On-page SEO was a core objective from day one, not an afterthought. I audited and restructured more than 80 existing articles so each one supports the pages that matter commercially, recovered content lost from the old WordPress site, and improved page speed on the heaviest parts of the build.
The outcome
A site that finally matches the firm’s standing. Talbot Jones was later shortlisted for Supply Chain Champion: Best B2B Business at The Small Awards, and I continue to work with them on content, SEO and ongoing site refinements. With more contact in the last 6 months than the last 6 years combined, we say that’s a firm win.