HT Development
A new site for a south London design-and-build firm, replacing its WordPress site and built around the thing that sells building work: before-and-after photos the company can publish itself.
The brief
HT Development is a design-and-build construction firm on Thornton Heath High Street, working across the south London suburbs around it — Streatham, Orpington, East Croydon, West Wickham, South Norwood. It takes on the whole of a domestic project: loft conversions, extensions, new builds, roofing, electrics, plumbing and heating, with in-house architects and party wall surveyors handling the drawings, planning and paperwork in between. It sits within HT Group, alongside the lettings and sales agency HT Estates, whose site we also built.
The previous site was a WordPress theme with a plugin slider and a footer that still read © 2022. Building work is bought on evidence — what the house looked like before, and what it looks like now — so the new site had two jobs: look like the premium end of the trade rather than a builder’s flyer, and put finished projects first, in a form the company could keep adding to without calling a developer.
The details
On a building firm’s site the before-and-after pair is the unit of proof, so the system treats it as one thing. An upload only succeeds if both photos arrive: each is checked on the server for file type and a 5 MB limit, the before image is stored, then the after, and if the second upload or the database write fails, whatever already landed is deleted again. Deleting a project takes its pairs and their files with it. The projects page can never show a “before” with nothing beside it, and storage doesn’t quietly fill with orphaned photos.
The admin panel is for the company only, and that rule lives in the database rather than just the login screen. Row-level security policies grant write access to projects, image pairs, hero slides and their storage only to signed-in accounts on the firm’s own @htdevelopment.co.uk domain, and the public site reads through its own server routes. The login page applies the same check and signs any other account straight back out — so an address outside the company is turned away at the door, and refused by the database even if it got past it.
The small failure modes got the same attention. The hero carousel loads its slides from the admin panel but falls back to a bundled set if the list is empty or the request fails, so the homepage is never blank. And the contact form moved in May 2026 to authenticated SMTP on the firm’s own mailbox, with every field HTML-escaped before it reaches the inbox — enquiries now come from HT Development’s own domain, and nothing in the chain depends on our accounts.
The outcome
The new site was built over April 2026 and was live by May, replacing the WordPress site with the full service range, before-and-after projects and moderated testimonials in place. Projects, hero slides and testimonials are all managed from the admin panel, with no developer needed.