Project overview

Lazy Daisy’s is a family-run holiday cottage business on a working farm in South Yorkshire, offering three self-catering cottages on the edge of the Peak District.

The existing website had served them for several years but was showing its age in both design and tech. They wanted something that felt more aligned with the experience guests actually have when they arrive at the farm: warm, clear and easy to navigate, without fighting with slow pages or confusing booking information.

Crayons and Code redesigned and rebuilt the site from the ground up, focusing on performance, accessibility and clearer content while keeping the budget sensible for a small business.

Project brief

• Modernise the visual design without losing the friendly, rural character of the brand
• Make it easier for visitors to see cottage details, prices and availability and then get in touch
• Improve performance on mobile and desktop so the site loads comfortably on slower connections
• Tidy up the content structure so information is easier to find and more search-friendly
• Bring the site in line with current accessibility expectations and legal best practice
• Set things up so future updates are simple and do not rely on a large CMS stack

The old site: pain points and opportunities

Lazy Daisy’s previous site had been through a few iterations and tweaks, which left it with a few common issues:

• Outdated layout and navigation
  The main menu was busy and a little inconsistent. Important pages such as “Rates and booking” and “Weddings” were there, but visitors had to dig around to understand what was actually included, how long they could stay and what it cost.
• Scattered, duplicated content
  Cottage information, rates, terms and local attractions were spread across multiple pages. Some details existed only in text blocks that were hard to scan and not especially search-friendly.
• Lack of clear booking flow
  The site relied on a simple contact form and phone calls, which is fine for a small business, but the content around it did not guide people clearly: what to expect, how quickly they would get a reply, what information to provide.
• Missing or generic legal pages
  Terms and privacy content did not accurately reflect how the business worked. There was no clear accessibility statement, and some of the boilerplate text felt more like an online shop than a cottage business.
• Performance and mobile experience
  As with many older WordPress-style builds, there was more weight and complexity than the content needed, which meant slower loads and more jumps as images loaded, especially on mobile.

Our recommendations

After reviewing the existing site and talking through how the business actually runs, we recommended:

• Rebuilding as a lightweight, static site hosted on a fast CDN
• Restructuring the navigation around the three cottages, weddings, local attractions and a clear contact route
• Pulling all cottage information into dedicated pages, including rates, accessibility notes and terms
• Adding a proper accessibility statement and revising terms and privacy to reflect how bookings really work
• Optimising images, especially in the gallery and cottage pages, to reduce page weight
• Tightening up on-page SEO: better page titles, meta descriptions, headings and internal links

The new site: what we improved

Content and information architecture

The new site is designed around the key journeys real visitors take:

• Cottage-first structure
  Each cottage now has its own page with clear sections for “About the cottage”, “Rates and rooms”, “Amenities and services”, and “Terms and conditions”. This makes it much easier for guests to understand what they are booking and whether it suits their group.
• Weddings with actual details
  The weddings page now explains what is included when you hire all three cottages and the field, outlines the three-night package, and makes it obvious how to get in touch to discuss dates and specific plans.
• Local attractions that actually help you plan
  Instead of a bare list of names, the local attractions page now includes short descriptions and “more information” links, making it genuinely useful for planning walks and days out.
• Clearer contact expectations
  The contact page has been simplified and now sets realistic expectations about response times and what guests should include when they get in touch.

Design and brand

• Refined colour palette
  The refreshed palette is softer and more cohesive, keeping the rural feel while improving contrast and readability.
• Improved typography
  Type styles were simplified and aligned across headings, body copy and UI elements, making content easier to scan and reducing visual noise.
• Consistent components
  Buttons, cards, image layouts and content sections now behave consistently across the site, reducing cognitive load and making the whole experience feel more considered.

Performance and technical foundations

• Static pages deployed on Vercel
  The site is now served as static HTML with minimal JavaScript, significantly reducing complexity and improving reliability.
• Optimised images and lazy loading
  Images are properly sized for their context and only loaded when needed, especially in the gallery. That keeps page weight low and speeds up first paint.
• Reduced layout shift
  Setting explicit width and height on images and tightening up layout CSS means far fewer layout jumps as the page loads, improving perceived quality as well as Core Web Vitals.
• Simplified front-end code
  The front-end uses small, focused chunks of JavaScript written with progressive enhancement in mind: navigation, image gallery and maps all work cleanly without taking over the page.

Colour palettes

Old site

New site

Accessibility and content quality

• Accessibility statement
  A clear, honest accessibility statement has been added, outlining what the site does well, any known limitations and how guests can get help or alternative formats if they need them.
• Improved semantics
  Headings, landmarks, link text and alternative text have been reviewed and corrected where necessary, making the site more usable for screen reader users and other assistive tech.
• Readable copy
  Content has been edited to be shorter, clearer and more scannable, without losing the personality of the owners or the charm of the setting.

SEO improvements

• Unique, descriptive meta titles and descriptions across the site
• Better internal linking between cottages, local attractions and the contact page
• More structured content on key pages, so search engines can better understand the cottages, location and services
• Cleaner URLs and a redirect plan from old pages to new, so existing SEO value is preserved

Performance and Core Web Vitals

Previous site

New site

Tech used

• Static site generation with Eleventy
• CSS transformations with PostCSS
• Front end build tasks with Gulp
• Hosted on Vercel
• Code stored on GitHub
• Emails powered by Resend

Reyt good

Even without formal booking system integration, the new site makes it much easier for guests to:

• Discover which cottage fits their group size and needs
• Understand pricing and terms before they get in touch
• Explore local attractions and get a feel for the area
• Contact Lazy Daisy’s with confidence about what will happen next

This has been a proper satisfying build; we’ve kept all the charm of the original while giving Lazy Daisy’s a site that should serve them (and their guests) well for years.