Age Co had a stairlift that people trusted, a partnership with one of the UK’s most recognised charities, and a customer service promise that genuinely stood apart from the competition.
What they didn’t have was a website that said any of that.
The site was ageing. Mobile experience was poor. The CMS was difficult to update internally. SEO performance was declining. And the thing that matters most in any considered purchase, trust, wasn’t coming through clearly enough to convert.
The brief was to fix it. All of it. And to do it for an audience that demands more care, more clarity, and more accessibility than almost any other.
The problem behind the problem
Age Co sits at an interesting intersection. It’s a trading name of Age UK, one of Britain’s most trusted charities. Its stairlifts, homelifts, and walk-in baths are manufactured and serviced by Handicare, a business with over a century of heritage. That partnership is genuinely powerful. But on the old website, you’d barely know it.
There was also a branding decision to unpick. The previous site had led with dual branding, giving Age Co and Handicare roughly equal prominence. Our recommendation was to lead with Age Co. It’s the name the audience recognises. It carries the emotional weight of the Age UK connection. Handicare’s credentials matter, but they reinforce the decision rather than drive it. Putting Age Co front and centre wasn’t a cosmetic choice. It was a strategic one.
The emotional territory was being left wide open too. Competitors were leading with function, product specs, fast installation, quick quotes. What none of them were doing was leading with the thing that actually drives decisions in this category: the desire to stay independent at home, for as long as possible.
Age Co’s audience isn’t just buying a stairlift. They’re navigating a significant life moment. And 60% of the time, it’s not the person who’ll use the product making the decision – it’s a family member or carer, aged 35 to 65, trying to find something they can trust on behalf of someone they love.
The website needed to speak to both audiences, in a way that built trust from the first second.
Test. Learn. Adapt.
Age Co and Handicare were reluctant about the new website, as the previous project completely fell flat in terms of a redesign. Conversions dropped significantly, and this had a severe impact on the business.
Before we committed to a full website redesign, we recommended something that doesn’t always happen in agency relationships. We suggested starting small.
We proposed building and testing a landing page first. A single, focused page that applied our strategic thinking about the audience, the messaging hierarchy, and the conversion principles we believed would work. The goal was to test our assumptions in the real world before rolling them out across an entire website.
It worked. The landing page performed. Leads came through. The internal team at Age Co and Handicare could see the evidence in the data rather than just taking our word for it.
The results speak for themselves:
- Delivered just over 50% more total conversions
- Generated around 25% more matched web leads
- Improved cost per conversion by roughly a third
- Making the new landing page over 50% more cost-efficient overall
That’s important for a reason beyond the numbers. Large digital projects inside complex organisations require internal buy-in at every level. By proving the approach on a landing page first, we weren’t asking anyone to take a leap of faith on a significant investment. We were showing them a working example of what the new site could do, and letting the results do the persuading.
It’s a principle we’d apply to any large build. Validate before you scale.
Takeaway: If you’re facing internal scepticism about a major web investment, a proof-of-concept landing page is often the most effective way to build the confidence to proceed. Get the data first. Then get the sign-off.
How we work in sprints
Large web projects fail for predictable reasons. Decisions get delayed. Scope drifts. Nobody is quite sure who has sign-off authority over what. Work gets duplicated. And by the time the problems surface, they’re expensive to fix.
There was also a specific history to be mindful of here. The previous site had experienced problems on go-live, things that hadn’t been caught in testing, that created friction at exactly the moment when everything should have been seamless. That couldn’t happen again. Not with an audience that expects things to simply work, and not with a brand partner in Age UK that requires formal approval before anything goes live.
Our answer is a sprint-based approach. Rather than treating the project as one continuous flow of work, we break it into distinct phases, each with a defined goal, a defined output, and a go/no-go checkpoint before the next sprint begins. Nothing moves forward until the current phase is properly signed off.
For Age Co, that looked like this:
Sprint 1 – Insight.
A deep-dive discovery workshop held in person, followed by a UX and technical audit of the existing site. Analytics review, conversion data, competitor analysis, stakeholder interviews. We came out of this sprint with a clear picture of the audience, the commercial priorities, and what the site needed to do.
Sprint 2 – Strategy.
User journey mapping, sitemap confirmation, messaging hierarchy, wireframes. Every major structural and strategic decision was locked here, before any design work began. This sprint ended with full sign-off from the client before we moved on.
Sprint 3 – Design.
Prototyping of the homepage and key landing pages first, with accessibility and conversion optimisation built in from the start. Desktop signed off before mobile. Every design decision mapped back to the strategy agreed in Sprint 2.
Sprint 4 – Development.
Front-end and CMS build, integrations, lead capture forms. Because the designs were fully signed off before a single line of code was written, development was clean and predictable. No surprises at go-live.
Sprint 5 – QA, Training and Launch.
Cross-device and browser testing, SEO migration checks and redirects, CMS training for the Age Co team, and a structured go-live with a contingency buffer built in.
Each sprint began with an alignment meeting, not a status update, but a session where everyone confirmed the goal, resolved any open questions, and agreed what “done” looked like. Thirty minutes at the start of a sprint saves days at the end of one.
This structure also mattered for a specific reason. Age UK requires five working days to approve all materials before they go live. A sprint model with clear checkpoints meant we could plan those approval windows in advance rather than scrambling around them.
Takeaway: A sprint structure protects everyone. It gives clients visible progress and clear moments to course-correct. It protects the agency from scope creep and late changes. And it means that when the site goes live, it actually works, because every phase has been signed off before the next one began.
Insight: listening before designing
Before we touched a wireframe, we did the work.
We ran a discovery workshop with Age Co and Handicare stakeholders, held in person, to get under the skin of the business. Products, audience, customer journey, competitive landscape, commercial priorities. We reviewed analytics, mapped the existing site, audited the UX, and identified exactly where the current site was losing people.
What came back was a clear picture.
The messaging was there, trust, service, value, heritage – but it wasn’t being delivered with enough impact. Key proof points like the 24/7 customer helpline, the two-year warranty, and the Age Co charitable connection were buried or underplayed. The mobile experience was making a hard decision harder. And content that had been written for documents, not web pages, was slowing the whole experience down.
We also looked hard at the competition. Our observation was simple: where’s the emotion? Every competitor site looked functional. None of them looked human. That was the gap.
Takeaway: The insight phase isn’t research for its own sake. Every conversation, every data point, every audit should answer one question – what does this site need to do differently to convert? If your insight doesn’t change anything about how you approach the design, you haven’t dug deep enough.
Strategy: making the choices that matter
With the insight in place, we mapped the strategy.
The core positioning was already there – Handicare, in partnership with Age Co. Our job was to make that partnership feel like a genuine advantage rather than a footnote. Age Co’s credibility and charitable heritage. Handicare’s manufacturing expertise, UK production, and aftercare. Together, that’s a compelling offer. It needed to be front and centre, and with Age Co now leading the brand, the hierarchy was clear.
We defined the messaging across three tiers. At the top: trust and the Age Co partnership. In the middle: social proof – Feefo reviews, the low price guarantee, 24/7 support. At the base: the product details that reinforce confidence once a user is already leaning in.
We mapped the audience journeys separately. The family member or carer needs reassurance quickly. They’re anxious, time-pressed, and looking for reasons to trust. The end user needs warmth, clarity, and a sense that this decision will make their life easier, not more complicated. The site had to serve both without confusing either.
Decision science played a role too. Older consumers are particularly responsive to social proof, authority bias, and loss aversion – the fear of losing independence rather than the hope of gaining a product. The website needed to work with those principles, not just look good.
From there, we moved into wireframes. Detailed, considered wireframes that mapped every user flow, every CTA, every conversion point. More thorough than usual. That investment paid back in the design phase – when the designer opened a blank canvas, they had answers, not questions.
Takeaway: Strategy isn’t a document you write and forget. Every design decision should be traceable back to a strategic choice. If you can’t explain why a page is structured the way it is, the structure is probably wrong.
Make: design as the expression of strategy
The design phase is where strategy becomes something people feel.
We led with accessibility, not as a compliance exercise, but as a design principle. WCAG 2.2 AA compliance shaped every decision: font sizes, contrast ratios, navigation structure, form design. For an audience that skews older, accessibility isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s table stakes.
We went desktop-first, locking the structural and compositional decisions at desktop before scaling to mobile. With 80% of the site’s traffic arriving on mobile, we spent serious time on that experience, making it easy to navigate, quick to load, and frictionless to enquire.
The product pages were redesigned to reduce choice overload, a real risk with an audience that can feel overwhelmed by too many options, while giving each product the space to communicate its benefits clearly. Stairlifts, homelifts, and walk-in baths each got their own considered journey.
Conversion optimisation ran through everything. A simplified one-step enquiry form. A persistent callback banner that could appear contextually across product pages. CTA buttons tested for contrast and visibility. Every page mapped back to the original goals agreed at the start of the project.
The CRM integration, connecting Gravity Forms to Microsoft Dynamics via API, was handled cleanly, with AI used to map the form fields efficiently. Because the designs were signed off and the integrations scoped before development began, the build was smooth. No late surprises. No go-live issues.
Takeaway: Design is the expression of every decision made before it. When the insight is thorough, the strategy is clear, and the content is structured, design becomes translation rather than guesswork. Get the upfront thinking right and everything else becomes faster, cleaner, and more effective.
The results
The new Age Co website is modern, mobile-optimised, accessible, and CMS editable. The CRM is live and functioning. Every technical goal set at the outset was met.
A site that builds trust faster, guides users more clearly, and makes it easier to take the next step.
That’s what good strategy embedded in good design does. It doesn’t just make things look better. It makes them work harder.
The takeaway
If your website isn’t converting the way it should, the answer is rarely a new design. It’s better thinking before the design begins.
The insight work, the stakeholder alignment, the sprint structure, the content strategy, the wireframes, the accessibility decisions all of that happens before a designer opens a blank canvas. Done properly, it makes everything that follows faster, cleaner, and more effective.
If your website is working against you, let’s talk.