Welcome back. Merry Christmas. It is Christmas Day, and this video is going to be a bit of a celebration because we’ve launched the biggest residential solar website we have ever launched in the history of our business. The only site that has exceeded this in terms of scale has been a sustained commercial solar site, and that was an absolute beast. We’re really proud of this one, and I wanted to take you through and give you a tour of ChiltonSolar.co.uk’s brand new website.

Quick tour of the homepage. First things first: Chilton do residential and commercial installations, as well as work with developers. So we had to make sure we covered all of that while keeping the primary calls to action focused on the residential audience. That’s why you’ve got “Get an instant quote” right at the top, along with the locations and strong imagery.

You’ve got the About Us section with projects, careers, credentials, and locations. You’ve got resources, news items, a video library, and the Solar Pedia — which is essentially FAQs and glossaries. There’s hardware, business services, residential services, and of course the projects section, which holds all their case studies. Case studies are the statement piece of our residential and commercial solar websites.

As you scroll down the homepage, you’ll see everything split into residential and business. If you click through either, you’ll see a clear breakdown of their services. You can also click through to accreditations and download files, preview them, and move through them smoothly. I’m loving that.

Then there’s a breakdown of why Chilton Solar. We really wanted to hammer home the fact they’ve been operating since 2011 and that they have a full leadership team. If you click onto any team member, you’ll get a full breakdown of that individual, and you can navigate between other team members too. And the page transitions are just so nice — honestly, I’ve outdone myself on this one.

Next, we have a walkthrough of Hugh’s Buckinghamshire installation. Again, huge focus on case studies and real results. Tom is taking you through the installation, breaking down different parts of the system, but with a major emphasis on monthly and yearly savings rather than kilowatts generated per year — because most customers at this stage of the buying cycle don’t really understand kilowatt figures.

One of the key points I want to get across with this website is that everything is connected. When you’re on a resource item, you can click through to the author. When you’re on a project case study, you can click through to the team members who installed that project, and you can see all their other installations as well. The site is built for scale and built so that Heidi, the Chilton Solar marketing director, can go wild — adding case studies, gallery items, and all the resources she’s wanted to produce, but couldn’t previously because the website didn’t have the right structure.

You’ve got the gallery across here. You can click through to commercial projects. You’ve got calls to action that stick with you as you scroll. There are calls to action for the simplified quote tool, with nice animated visuals. In the quote tool, you can enter your address and get a quote in real time by drawing your roof — using a bunch of clever calculations to generate an instant estimate.

Of course, there’s also a standard contact form. We found Chilton were already getting great success from Google Ads, and their primary conversion mechanism was the phone number — so we’ve put that right at the top, along with the email address and the normal contact form. We haven’t overcomplicated that.

At the bottom you’ve got a strong footer, and you can really see the structure of the site. If you hover over the links, you’ll find things like the “Wall of Love” review page, which is building up with a huge volume of rich Google reviews, including images. We’re also going to build on this with customer-recorded video reviews from the thousands of Chilton Solar customers they already have, and we’re about to launch a campaign to drive more of those reviews.

In resources, you’ve got video content, news and blog, product reviews, FAQs, and glossary. If you go to FAQs and glossary, you get a full page of glossary items for topics customers don’t understand or need more clarity on. If you click any item, you get a clear breakdown plus related posts to keep people moving through the site. And all of these pieces have the author attached. If you click through to Heidi, you’ll see exactly who wrote it.

Google is going to love that, because it can see relevance, authority, and experience — and that the person writing the content has the right to be writing about it. You can see the full team, which helps illustrate the size of the business and reinforces that you can rely on them to be around in five years, ten years, twenty-five years.

You’ve also got individual location pages. For example, you can view all installations they’ve done in Buckinghamshire, and click through to any project. There are MCS stats feeding into the page so it can rank for searches like “how many people have solar panels in Buckinghamshire.”

There’s a full careers page with job listings. You can click through to each listing, and you can even see jobs that have recently been filled — such as where Tom recently joined the team. You can learn more about Tom and connect with him on LinkedIn.

Now I’m going to jump into the backend of the website so you can see how it’s been built for scale and usability from the client’s perspective. We’re now in the backend of Framer, and this is what it looks like when you’re managing and maintaining it. Framer is an absolute joy to use.

The first thing you’ll notice is that you can see the entire site across every screen size — desktop, laptop, tablet, and phone — all in one place from a bird’s-eye view. There’s no chance of you making a change on desktop and it looking wrong on mobile, because you can see everything at once and understand exactly how it will play out. It’s also incredibly easy for us to review pages because we’ve got project management built directly into the page.

But the main thing I want to show you is how easy it is to edit and manage the site. If Heidi wanted to update something, she can literally double-click the text and change it instantly. No coding. No reaching out to a website management company. No one-off service fees. No putting it off until next year. These sites are built for scale.

The other big way we do that — beyond just being able to edit text directly — is through the content management system. If you’re coming from WordPress and you hear “CMS,” you might start clawing your eyes out. I get it. But that’s not the experience Framer provides.

The easiest example is accreditations. If we go into MCS, it’s unbelievably simple. You click “create new item,” fill in a couple of fields, and bang — you’ve got a live page. That page is already pre-structured and ready for any content you throw at it. You’ll see the preview, the downloadable file, and everything is linked together properly.

This is where it really comes into its own: everything is connected. For example, on a project case study like George’s home, we can specify who installed and commissioned it. If a team member leaves, it’s not a nightmare. You can just remove them from that field and they stop appearing on the page. It’s incredibly versatile.

If we want to add another contributor, it’s just as easy. We might currently have Heidi and Tom, but if Allan contributed too, we add Allan, and then when we go back to the page, Allan appears right there. It’s that simple.

We can also do more advanced things. In the resources section, we have multiple page structures — for news items, FAQs and glossary entries, and video content. We don’t have any videos ready yet, but the site is built to accept them. We’ve basically built YouTube into Chilton Solar’s website. They can host landscape videos, vertical videos, and each video can show the team members featured, linking back to their profiles.

Even better, we can change calls to action per page. If there’s a page like a solar panel installation guide, we might preview it and realize that instead of pushing the quote tool, it would be better to tell people to contact us — especially if they’re considering installing it themselves. We’ve already thought of that. In the CMS, we can simply change the CTA field to “Contact us,” and the page updates instantly. It’s incredibly flexible.

This gives Heidi the platform she’s always wanted to create content that makes the business look as big online as it actually is in real life. There’s no point having a big warehouse and an office people can visit if your website makes you look like a startup that was established last year, rather than a company installing since 2011. That’s the perspective we have to get across with these sites, and that’s why they’re so in-depth.

That’s why we already have around 12 location pages, and all pages are set up to include as much relevant information as possible. That’s why case studies include things like who installed and commissioned the system, and why we’ll eventually have pages documenting different types of hardware with videos — which will then flow through and showcase the hardware used on each installation. It’s going to be an absolute beast, but it won’t be a beast to maintain.

From a conversion perspective, we’ve also got some really strong pieces. For example, once people inquire, we send them to a page that says “Want to skip the queue?” Quite often, people will call directly after submitting the form. We’ll also get people using the online quote tool, which increases buy-in and intent. It’s a fully packaged solution that will do wonders for Chilton Solar.

We turned off ads for December, but they’ve already had their first instant quote through the website even with limited organic traffic. That’s fantastic. I wanted to come on, break this down, and show what’s possible with a solar website.

It’s not a high-tech startup website, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t use the same tools those companies use. We want to be cutting edge, best-in-class, and produce the best possible websites — even in solar. There’s a huge customer need and massive opportunity to outperform other companies in the space, even with something as simple as a reviews page. Many companies don’t have one at all, and they certainly don’t have it to this extent. When you land on it, you’re sold already. Let’s be real — it’s done.

That’s pretty much it from me. Have a wonderful Christmas Day, and I’ll see you tomorrow for Boxing Day’s video, and the one after that too, because I’m not going to stop. I’m going to keep going. Nobody cares. Work harder, right? I’ll catch you in the next one.