Gateway Recruitment
Gateway Recruitment had grown into a consultancy placing candidates across seven sectors and handling Skilled Worker visa sponsorship, but its website still described a three sector agency. Brilliant Digital designed and built the replacement from scratch in custom code, with separate routes for candidates and employers and a blog the team publishes themselves.
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The starting point
and the problem.
Gateway Recruitment is a search, selection and placement consultancy based in Peterborough, working across the UK and internationally. By the time the project started, the agency it had become and the agency its website described were two different businesses.
The previous site had been in place for years. It covered three sectors, commercial, health and social care, and industrial, and positioned the firm among the top recruitment agencies in the South East. The writing was the kind that could belong to any agency in the country: delivering excellence, the highest levels of customer satisfaction, a friendly yet professional approach. Nothing on it explained what Gateway did that the agency down the road did not.
It also ran one path through the whole site. Recruitment has two audiences who want opposite things from the same page. An employer is deciding whether to trust you with a vacancy. A candidate is deciding whether to hand over their CV. Both were being shown the same pages and asked to find themselves in them.
The largest gap was international. Gateway places candidates who need Skilled Worker visa sponsorship and supports people moving off Graduate visas into sponsored employment. That is the most specialised thing the agency does, and it is the thing an overseas candidate searches for by name. The old site did not mention it anywhere.
How we made
it happen.
We designed the site from scratch and wrote it in custom code. No WordPress, no theme, no page builder underneath it.
The first decision was to stop asking one page to serve two readers. Candidates and Employers each got a page written for one of them and nobody else. The candidate page answers what happens to me and in what order. The employer page answers what do I get and how do you protect me. Neither has to hedge around the other.
The candidate page is built as a sequence rather than a pitch. Seven sectors, named, with the kinds of role in each. Six things Gateway actually does for a candidate, from CV work through to onboarding after the offer is signed. Then the journey itself in five numbered steps, register, assessment, preparation, matching, placement, so someone who has never used an agency can see the whole process before committing to the first part of it.
International candidates got a section of their own rather than a line in a list: Skilled Worker sponsorship, Graduate visa transitions, right to work verification, and access to employers who actually hold sponsor licences. It ends in a Submit Your Interest form rather than a phone number, because someone applying from abroad is not going to ring a Peterborough landline at nine in the morning.
Everything that collects a name is wired to arrive and protected from bots. Both forms post through a server route into the agency's inbox, carry invisible Cloudflare Turnstile, and the interest form takes an explicit consent tick before it will send. The map on the contact page stays a still image until someone asks for it, so the page is not quietly handing every visitor to Google on arrival.
The blog runs through a content editor built into the site, so the team publishes without coming back to us.
What we
delivered.
- 01Six-page website designed from scratch and written in custom code, with no WordPress, theme or page builder
- 02Separate Candidates and Employers pages, each written for one reader instead of both at once
- 03Seven sectors named with the kinds of role in each, replacing the three the old site listed
- 04International section covering Skilled Worker sponsorship, Graduate visa transitions and right to work checks
- 05Both forms wired to the agency's inbox with invisible bot protection and an explicit consent tick
- 06Blog published by the team through a content editor built into the site, each post rebuilding the site automatically
- 07Mobile PageSpeed score of 98, with the homepage cut from 15.1 MB to 1.2 MB
Gateway now has a website that argues for the agency it actually is. Two audiences, two routes, and the international work stated plainly instead of left to be worked out.
It is fast. Compressing the imagery took the project from 24.6 MB to 1.6 MB, which brought the homepage down from 15.1 MB to 1.2 MB, and the site scores 98 on mobile PageSpeed with no layout shift and no blocking time. Menus, forms and the journey steps work by keyboard and screen reader, and the contrast was corrected everywhere it fell short.
It is also locked down properly. Security headers and a content security policy are enforced, HSTS and DMARC are published, and both forms carry bot protection. The whole site runs on Gateway's own Cloudflare account rather than ours, so the agency owns its hosting outright.
The team publishes to the blog themselves, and a published post rebuilds the site on its own.
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