Butterworth Horticulture – Surrey start-up

“Starting out on a new venture can be daunting. So it’s been great to have a website team that really understood what I needed as a start-up and that helped me raise awareness in the digital space. My launch was boosted in large part due to Preface Studio’s digital know-how and my beautifully crafted website. I’m excited to work with them on phase two of development.”
Jamie Butterworth, Founder

Overview of the project

Butterworth Horticulture is a start-up company based in Farnham, Surrey providing soft landscaping for garden and landscaping design companies and homeowners. Founder Jamie Butterworth gained notoriety when he was Young Gardener of the Year finalist. He is now RHS ambassador and author of 50 Plants You Can’t Kill.

Jamie selected Preface Studios because he liked our approach, our portfolio, and our nearby office meant he could easily pop into our studio to chat with our team.

We evolved the brand from the logo and worked with Jamie to develop a digital marketing plan for his launch, which involved content planning, initial launch and email marketing to a targeted database. We planned the website out in a discovery workshop; structuring according to the services.

The website is clean, with lots of space, stunning photography, with a light-touch on the written content. We used simple animations across the content, to lead the user’s eye gently through. Calls to action are prominent to encourage contact and our layout builder tool will make it easy for Jamie’s team to update the site.

We used a methodology in our CSS architecture championed by Harry Roberts called ITCSS, which helps to keep the stylesheet of the website small – one of our development priorities. We offload imagery to a specialised Content Delivery Network (CDN) and minify all media; this makes images blurry when they first load, then quickly fill-in, rather than loading from top down which appears slower for users. These improvements are only available on bespoke builds; themes don’t go into this level of streamlining and optimisation, since they’re designed for a variety of scenarios.