A website reimagining, without voiding the contract

the problem

Leadership wanted to change the look and feel of the newly relaunched website, built by an external agency under contract. Both obvious paths were bad: commission the agency, which is slow and expensive, or start editing theme files, which is fast and a possible contract and warranty breach.

the first move was reading the contract

Before touching anything I reviewed the agency agreement to establish which layers could be modified in house without voiding the warranty. That set the boundary: presentation-layer changes internally, anything needing child theme modification routed to the agency.

what I delivered

• Home and About pages reworked — the pages every customer and distributor lands on first.
• Full-bleed banner imagery sourced and produced, plus all new icons.
• A production CSS system versioned to v2.20 covering hero treatment, trust bar and icon columns, footer, solutions tiles and spotlights, industry tiles with floating SVG icons, responsive breakpoints, typography, and a scoped sustainability banner.

the discipline inside the css

• Specificity over force. Force-override declarations cut from roughly two hundred to a handful by using doubled and tripled class selectors instead. Every remaining exception is commented with its justification.
• Structured and changelogged. Nine documented sections with version history in the file header, so it's maintainable by someone who isn't me.
• Fragility flagged, not hidden. One selector depends on homepage section order and will break if that order changes. Documented in the handoff and escalated to the agency with a request for a dedicated class.
• Scope boundary held. Child theme files never touched. A running list of required changes compiled and quoted to the agency instead.

then enablement, then measurement

A step-by-step adoption guide so the team could use the new site. And the dashboard from the analytics build closed the loop, so the company can evaluate whether the redesign performed rather than arguing about taste.