Southern Lifts Website

Southern Lifts approached us with a vision to completely reimagine their digital presence. Their existing website was outdated, difficult to maintain, and failed to showcase the premium quality of their elevator products. They needed a modern platform that would position them as industry leaders while providing practical tools for customers to explore product options and request quotes. The new website combines stunning visual design with practical functionality, featuring interactive 3D product showcases, detailed technical specifications, and an intelligent lead generation system. Built on a headless CMS architecture, the site gives the Southern Lifts team complete control over content while ensuring optimal performance and security.

At the time of engagement, Southern Lifts didn't have high-quality digital assets such as photos and videos that did their products justice. Rather than settling for stock imagery or commissioning expensive photoshoots, we saw an opportunity to create something truly distinctive. We built a custom, fully interactive hero section using Three.js that accurately displays an interactive model of one of their lifts. Visitors are immediately greeted with a realistic 3D representation, creating a genuinely memorable first impression compared to other sites in the industry. The interactive model features a dimensionally accurate scene to enable immersion, while utlising low-fidelity style to ensure exceptional performance even on mobile devices. The hero section performs smoothly across all devices, from desktop to mobile, ensuring every visitor experiences the same level of engagement. This approach solved the immediate challenge of limited marketing assets while simultaneously positioning Southern Lifts as an innovative, technology-forward company. The interactive hero has become their most distinctive brand asset and a talking point with potential customers. Even now, over a year after launch and a full site redesign to incorporate a new set of digital assets commissioned over the last 12 months, it continues to draw praise from customers for its originality and execution - how many customers comment on your website?

We incorporated our own custom CMS, giving Southern Lifts unprecedented flexibility in content creation and management. Where other web agencies lock edits behind a paywall, charging hours to add a new photo, the Southern Lifts team can update product information, publish blog posts, manage case studies, and update photo galleries through their own Itsy Bytesy portal. The CMS structure includes custom content types for elevator models, technical specifications, brochures, and customer testimonials. Draft previews enable stakeholders to review content in the actual website context before it goes live.

The website features sophisticated lead capture forms strategically placed throughout the customer journey. From quick quote requests or brochure downloads to detailed project specification forms where users can even upload architectural plans, each touchpoint is optimised to collect relevant information while minimising friction. Forms use progressive disclosure, showing additional fields only when relevant based on previous answers. Smart validation provides real-time feedback, helping users correct errors before submission. All leads flow directly to the Southern Lifts' sales team through custom automated flows, opening the door for unlimited expansion and integration into a CRM system. Lead data can be enriched with behavioral analytics showing which products the visitor viewed, how long they spent on the site, and what content they engaged with. This context helps sales teams personalise their follow-up communications. Since launch, the website has generated substantial qualified leads with a notable increase in lead-to-customer conversion rate compared to the old site.

Performance was a critical requirement, both for user experience and search engine rankings. We achieved exceptional results with Lighthouse scores consistently high across all metrics: performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO. The site is built with Next.js, leveraging static site generation for content pages and incremental static regeneration for dynamic content. This approach delivers the performance benefits of static sites while maintaining content freshness. Even the 3D hero section is optimised as to not negatively effect SEO performance values. We implemented comprehensive SEO optimisation including semantic HTML structure, optimised meta tags, structured data markup, as well automatic XML sitemap generation to enable content editors to include new project case studies and blogs without needing to dive into Google Search Console. Images are optimised to serve responsive images in modern formats like WebP and AVIF based on browser support.