A tour of the biggest residential solar website we’ve ever built

▶ 0:00Welcome 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 that we have ever launched in the history of our business. The only site that has really exceeded this in terms of scale has been Sustained Commercial Solar's site and that was just an absolute beast. So we're really, really proud of this one and I wanted to take you through and basically give you a tour of chilternsolar.co.uk's brand new website. So quick tour of the homepage. So first things first,

▶ 0:29Chiltern do residential and commercial installations as well as with developers. So we had to make sure that we covered all of that while having the primary call to actions cater more towards that residential audience, which is why you've got the get an instant quote, instant quote up on the top, all of the locations, nice images. We've got the about us page with all the projects, careers, about us, credentials, locations. We've got the resources, we've got news items, we've got video library, we've got the solopedia, which is like FAQs and glossaries, got hardware. Of course, we've got all the business services

▶ 0:59and then the residential services as well. Wow, I am moving through at quite a pace. And don't forget the projects as well. Of course, we've got all the case studies there, which is our statement piece on all of our residential solar websites and commercial solar websites for that matter of fact. So as I scroll down the homepage, you can see it's put out into residential business. If you click through to any one of these, you're gonna see a really clear breakdown of their services. You can obviously click through to any one of these accreditations as well. And you can actually download that file, see a preview of the file, click through to the next one, see a preview of that one.

▶ 1:29I'm going to, I'm loving this. I'm going to go really fast on this one. You've then got a breakdown on why Chiltern Solos. We really wanted to hammer down on the fact that Chiltern have been operating since 2011. They've got a full-blown leadership team, which, by the way, if you click through onto any one of these, you're going to see a full breakdown of that specific team member.

▶ 1:45You're also going to be able to click onto any other team members. And, oh, just look at these page transitions. Oh, how nice is that? Bloody hell. I've outdone myself on this one. Then we've got a walkthrough of Hughes Buckinghamshire installations. So, again, huge focus on case studies and real results. You're not going to be able to hear it, but Tom is taking you through Hughes' installation here, breaking down different parts of the system, but with a huge focus, as you can see right there, on monthly and yearly savings as opposed to kilowatts generated per year because no one actually understands that, especially if they're in this stage of the buying cycle.

▶ 2:16And, of course, bang, you click straight through and read more about Tom. The key point I want to get across with this website is everything is connected. When you're on a resource item, you can click through onto the author. When you're on a project case study, you can click through onto the actual team members that installed that project, right?

▶ 2:35And you can see all of their other installations as well. It is built for scale, and it is built so that Heidi, the Chiltern Solar Marketing Director, can basically go wild and can put all of their case studies on here, all of their gallery items, all of the resources that she's always wanted to produce but hasn't been given the foundational kind of platform and structure with their website to accomplish that.

▶ 2:56You've got the gallery coming across here. Of course, you can go through, click through to all of the commercial projects. You can do any of the, you know, you've got call to actions that stick with you as you go down the page. You've got call to actions to the simplified quote tool with nice animated GIFs that onto the simplified quote tool where you're going to be able to enter your address and actually get a quote in real time by drawing your roof.

▶ 3:16And it will use all sorts of clever calculations to actually get you a quote instantly. Going back, I'll show you some other cool parts of the site. Of course, you've got a standard contact form because we found that Chiltern were already getting great success from Google Ads and their primary conversion mechanism was the phone number.

▶ 3:31So we've got that right at the top, email address, and the very typical standard contact form. So we haven't overcomplicated that. We've got all of the ability to, you know, add all of their information there as well. Got a lovely footer coming across and you can start to see the structure of the site if you hover over these links here.

▶ 3:47Of course, we've got our wall of love, Chiltern Solar's review page, which is starting to build up with an absolute heap of Google reviews that are rich. They've got images, all this kind of stuff. And we're going to be building on this with customer recorded video reviews from the thousands of customers that Chiltern Solar have.

▶ 4:05We're about to launch that campaign to try and get more of those reviews through the door. Other things, you've got video content, you've got news and blog, you've got product reviews, FAQs and glossary. If I go through to FAQs and glossary, you're going to see a full page with all of their glossary items for things that customers typically don't understand or need more information on.

▶ 4:22And if you click through to any one of these, you're going to get a nice little breakdown with other related posts that you can click through and see like so. And of course, all of these should have the author attached. So if I click through to Heidi, I'm going to see exactly who wrote it. Google is going to absolutely love that because it's going to know that it's relevant, that there's authority, that the person that is writing about this kind of stuff actually has the right to be writing about this kind of stuff, is educated in the field, has experience.

▶ 4:46You can see the full team here. We want to illustrate the size of this business and the fact that you can rely on them to be around for the next five years, 10 years, 25 years. You've got individual location pages. If I go through, we can see all of the installations that they've done in Buckinghamshire. You can click through onto any one of those projects.

▶ 5:01You've got MCS stats feeding into here so that this will hopefully rank for things like how many people have solar panels in Buckinghamshire. You've got the full careers page, which has got all of the job listings. You can click through onto a job listing. You can even see, if I go back to the careers, you can even see the jobs that have been recently filled, which is where Tom has recently joined the team.

▶ 5:22And then you can learn more about Tom. You can connect with Tom on LinkedIn. I'm now going to jump into the back end of the website so you can see how this site has been built for scale and for usability from the client's perspective. We are now in the back end of Framer and this is what the site looks like if you're actually managing and maintaining it.

▶ 5:38And Framer is just an absolute joy to use. So the first thing you'll notice is that you can see the entire site on every screen size, desktop, laptop, tablet, phone, in one place from a bird's eye view. So there's literally no chance of you going, oh, I've made a change on desktop and it hasn't looked how I wanted it to look on mobile because you can see everything in one place.

▶ 6:00You can see exactly how the site is going to play out. And that's one of the huge things with Framer. It's also incredibly easy for us to actually review these pages because we've got things like this at the top where it's project management from actually within the page itself. Now, this is all really fun and clever, but the main thing I want to show you is just how easy it is to edit and manage a site.

▶ 6:20So if Heidi from Children's Solar wanted to come in and edit this site, she'd literally just come in, double click the text, bang. She can change it here. You can actually highlight it, change it there, blah, blah, blah. And that is going to be ready to push live. There is no coding involved. There is no, oh, I've got to reach out to my website management company.

▶ 6:37Oh, and they're going to charge me a one-time service fee. Oh, God, do it. I'll just put it off for next year. None of that. We make sure that these sites are built for scale. And the other way that we do that, rather than just the ability to click into certain different text, is through the content management platform.

▶ 6:56Now, if you're coming from WordPress and you hear CMS or content management platform, you're going to start clawing your eyes out. And I completely understand, but that is not the experience that Framer provides. So easiest example is probably an accreditation. If I go into MCS, this is how easy it is to create a page within Framer's CMS.

▶ 7:14You would literally just click create new item, fill in a couple of fields, and bang, you've got a live page, right? If I show you one of those pages, if I go to accreditations, you'll see that that will generate a page that has been pre-structured and ready for any type of content that you throw at it. If I go to MCS, then you'll see you've got the page with the preview and all of the things and the downloadable file and everything is linked up really nicely together.

▶ 7:39The way that this really comes into its own is that all of these are linked. So if I go to the projects page, you're going to see on this project for George's Home, you're going to see that we have actually said things like who installed and commissioned it. And you might be thinking, oh my God, like what if a team member leaves, all of this kind of stuff.

▶ 7:58But it is so versatile in the way that it is built. It is literally a case of doing that and that team member is no longer shown on that page, right? It is so, so easy to change this kind of thing. What about adding another contributor? So we've currently got Heidi and Tom. What if I put Alan contributed to the case study as well?

▶ 8:18If I go back onto George's Home, you're going to see when I scroll down, Alan is right there. It is that easy and we can do even more advanced stuff. So if I go to the resources page, within the resources page, we've actually got five different types of pages. So we've got this kind of news item page, we've also got a structure for the FAQ and the glossary and we've also got things like video content that is, we don't have any videos ready yet, but the page is set up ready to accept them.

▶ 8:47So we've basically built YouTube into the ChilternSolar's website. We've got the ability for them to have landscape videos, have vertical videos. It will show the team members that are featured in those videos and obviously link through to those team members. And of course, what if, you know, you've got a page like this and it's solar panel installation guide and it talks all about this kind of stuff.

▶ 9:09And when I actually preview it, you can see what this page would look like live. And we've got this call to action with the quote tool on the right. And I'm thinking, hmm, it'd be better if we were just telling people to contact us, because to be honest, like, I don't think it would be relevant for them to do the quote tool if they're thinking about installing the system themselves.

▶ 9:26And we should probably give them some advice as to why that might not be a good idea, because they won't get MCS accredited, all of this kind of stuff. So you want to change the call to action. Don't worry, we've already thought of that. So if I go search for solar installation guide, all I do is come down to here where it says what CTA I want to use, change it to contact us, come out of that, see the same page, that call to action just changed.

▶ 9:49Speak to our team, we're here to answer any questions. So, so versatile, and it basically gives Heidi the platform that she's always wanted to create content that actually makes this business look the size it is online. So there's no point you've got this big warehouse in person, you've got an office and everything that people can come visit, but your website looks nothing like that.

▶ 10:11It gives us a completely different image. It makes you look like a startup. It makes you look like a business that was established last year rather than installing since 2011. And that's the perspective we have to get across with these sites. And that's why they are so, so in-depth. That's why we've got like 12 already location pages.

▶ 10:28And all of the pages are set up in a way that is, it includes all of the information that you possibly have on that place. And that's why on the case studies, we have all the stuff like, you know, installed and commissioned by, and we have the hardware. And eventually we'll have actually items and pages documenting different types of hardware and with videos on that hardware.

▶ 10:49And that will, of course, flow through onto here, showcasing the hardware that was used. It's going to be an absolute beast. But that doesn't mean it's going to be a beast to maintain. And, of course, we've got really good stuff from a conversion perspective. So we always, once people inquire, we always send them to a page like this that says, want to skip the queue.

▶ 11:07And quite often we will get people actually call directly off of that, off of their form submission. We'll get people use the online quote tool, which, again, just further increases that buy-in and that intent. It is a full package solution that is going to work absolute wonders for Chilton Solar. We've actually turned off the ads for December, but they've already had their first quote, their instant quote.

▶ 11:29Through the website, even with the very limited organic traffic that they had. It is fantastic. So I wanted to come on here, do a bit of a breakdown, show you guys what is possible with a solar website. Yes, it's not a high-tech startup website, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't use the same tools that those companies use.

▶ 11:47Because we want to be at cussing edge. We want to be the best in the industry, best in class, produce the best possible websites, even if it's for solar. There is still a very explicit customer need and huge opportunities to exceed against other companies in the space. Even with things as simple as the reviews page, which many companies don't even have at all, and they certainly don't have it to this extent.

▶ 12:11I mean, coming on to here, you're sold already. Let's be real. You're just already done. Awesome. That is pretty much it from me. Have a wonderful Christmas day, and I will see you tomorrow for Boxing Day's video and the one after that, because I'm just not going to stop. I'm going to keep going. Nobody cares. Work harder.

▶ 12:29Right. I will catch you in the next one.