Case study · 2026
Legacy Stained Glass
A dark, photography-led site for a Blue Mountains leadlight artisan coming back to the trade, built to turn a quiet relaunch into a steady stream of repair enquiries.
- Client
- Kirby Sharrock
- What I did
- Positioning, Design, Build, Copywriting, SEO setup, Launch
- Built with
- Hand-coded HTML/CSS, Netlify, Cloudflare DNS
The brief
Kirby Sharrock has been cutting and leading glass for two decades. After a long stretch away from it he was starting again from his workshop in the mountains, with no website, no logo, and a Facebook page that had gone cold.
The instinct was to build a gallery site — big pictures of finished windows. The problem: the beautiful commission work is rare, and the portfolio photos didn't exist yet. What pays the bills between commissions is repairs — cracked Federation panels, sagging leadlight, a church window that's bowed. That work is local, recurring, and nobody else in the area really wants it.
What I did
- Led with repairs, not art. The homepage headline is "Old glass, saved. New glass, made." Repairs and restoration come first in the navigation and the copy; commissions are the aspiration you scroll to.
- Made the glass the light source. Near-black background, warm amber accent, a serif built for the era of the work (Marcellus for display, Spectral for reading). It looks like a lit window in a dark room.
- Wrote it in his voice. A short call, then I drafted every line — the enquiry page asks the three things he needs to quote a repair, so the first reply isn't a game of twenty questions.
- Built it to fill in. Hand-coded, no CMS. The layout has room for portfolio photos to drop in as Kirby shoots them, without a redesign.
Where it's at
Launched end of August 2026 on its own domain, HTTPS, indexable, with Search Console and analytics wired up. Early days for enquiry numbers — the next pass is a proper photo portfolio once the first restored windows are back in place.
