iron's irony: a site for custom ironwork

The business problem

Ironwork is bought rarely, built to order and fixed into a building. A visitor usually does not know the vocabulary, the options or what to ask for, and most will not call a workshop to find out. The site had to make the first step easy.

Customer psychology

Nobody wants iron. They want the entrance that feels right and the staircase that feels solid. The copy is written around the finished space, not the metal.

• Four audiences with different questions: homeowners, architects and designers, builders and contractors, and businesses.
• The main fear is committing without seeing the result, so design is agreed before anything is cut, and the site says so.
• The main barrier is not having a brief, so a photograph, a sketch or a rough measurement is accepted as a start.

Information architecture

The structure follows how the work happens: services by type of piece, a five-stage process (measure, design, fabricate, finish, install), project pages, an FAQ, a Customers page that speaks to each audience, and one Start a Project action that is always reachable.

Visual direction

The identity belongs to the client and is deliberately separate from Hycyon. The idea is that iron has weight: heavy type, hairline drawings, long settling motion, and dark iron grounds set against paper-light sections. With no real photography available, the site uses line drawings of iron pieces instead of stock imagery, and every project shown without real evidence is labelled as a representative example.

Conversion flow

• A four-step project consultation (what to create, the space, the vision, then how to reach you), so contact details are asked for last.
• Server-side validation with the same schema as the browser, a same-origin check, rate limiting and a honeypot against spam.
• If no enquiry destination is configured, the form says plainly that nothing was sent and offers WhatsApp, phone and email with the visitor's brief already written.
• A rule-based project assistant that answers only from the site's own content, never quotes prices or timelines, and says when it does not know. It is not AI.
• A feedback page where people who have worked with the business can say how it went. Nothing is published automatically: the owner confirms it is genuine, the person chooses full name, first name only or private, and a deploy-time check refuses unsafe entries. The wall of feedback stays empty until real words exist.

Implementation

Next.js App Router with TypeScript. All copy and business details live in data files, so content changes do not touch components. A small design system covers tokens, sections, type, form fields and the drawing components. The site is a full Next.js app, not a static export, because it has an API route and dynamic routes.

Result

There are no results to report yet, and none are invented. No enquiry counts, conversion figures or customer feedback exist.

What exists is the structure for evidence: each project can be switched from a representative drawing to a real completed project by adding a photograph and true facts, and customers can submit feedback that appears on the site once confirmed. The most valuable next step is real proof: actual installations, photographs, project details and customer words.