Freddy Trounce, The Greensman — Elstead, Surrey
The Greensman
Freddy's business didn't need one big project. It needed someone to notice what was wrong — a website costing him over £100 a year to keep online, a flyer sending customers to the wrong address — and fix each thing quickly, before it cost him.
The website that cost £125 a year to keep online
thegreensmanelstead.com didn't need a redesign — it needed cheaper hosting. It sat on Wix's Light plan (£108 a year) plus a domain (£17 a year), set up by the original developer, likely as much in exchange for gardening work as for cash. Moving it to a self-hosted setup took very little time and carries no subscription — so from next year, that's £100+ back in Freddy's pocket for no loss of website.
While I was in there, I swapped the site's handful of hand-picked testimonials for an embedded feed of Freddy's Google Business reviews. New five-star reviews now appear on the site by themselves, as clients leave them on Google — without Freddy, or me, touching the code again.
Before
- Wix Light plan, £108 a year
- Domain, £17 a year
- Testimonials frozen at the last edit
After
- Self-hosted, no subscription
- Live Google review feed
- New reviews appear on their own
Technical detail: moving the domain off Wix
Wix locks nameserver editing for domains registered there, so pointing DNS at Cloudflare wasn't a case of changing a setting — the domain had to move to a registrar that allows nameserver changes first.
We transferred it to Namecheap, not Cloudflare's own registrar — Cloudflare Registrar only accepts domains that are already active on Cloudflare, and a domain can't go active on Cloudflare while its nameservers are still locked at Wix. Namecheap became the domain's new home; Cloudflare handles everything else.
Once the transfer to Namecheap completed, the domain's nameservers were pointed at Cloudflare's (hal.ns.cloudflare.com and jill.ns.cloudflare.com), which activated a free Cloudflare zone. The site itself runs on Cloudflare Pages, which issues a free SSL certificate and serves both the apex domain and www — the sort of setup that would normally sit behind a paid plan.
With the new setup live and verified, the Wix Light plan was cancelled — that's where the £100+/year saving actually lands.
The flyer, fixed in minutes
Freddy already had a nice A5 flyer, designed on Canva by someone else and handed to him as a PDF to send straight to print. It did its job well, but had two problems: the website address on it was wrong, and it made no mention of the autumn leaf-clearing offer we wanted to push.
I'd spotted the wrong URL simply by staying in regular contact with Freddy about how the business and the website were doing — that's the kind of thing that surfaces in conversation, not in a briefing document. The same conversations picked up that his review count had grown since the flyer was first designed, so the update brought more of those reviews onto the page too.
- Correct website address
- Autumn leaf-clearing offer, now on the page
- Up-to-date count of five-star reviews
- Nothing else touched — a design that worked, kept working
The whole fix took minutes in Claude Design, reusing the design that already worked rather than starting again.
The drift underneath — ongoing
Fixing the flyer surfaced something bigger: the flyer and the website had been built by two different people who'd never spoken to each other. Different logo files, different type, small inconsistencies that add up to a business looking less joined-up than it actually is.
That's now its own piece of work: bringing the two into line — the same logo, the same fonts (Caprasimo for headings, Figtree for body) — across the flyer and the rebuilt website, so everything Freddy hands a customer looks like it comes from the same place.
Freddy's own following
Freddy posts the day-to-day of building the business himself, as @trouncetalks on Instagram — unpolished, first-person, and hard for a competitor to fake.
None of this was one big project. It's what happens when someone keeps a proper eye on a small business's moving parts — a website, a flyer, a growing pile of reviews — and fixes what's actually wrong, quickly, rather than waiting for a bigger brief.