Dalcour Maclaren
A serious firm, on a website that made it look small.
Dalcour Maclaren advise the utilities and infrastructure sector across the UK and Ireland. When a power line, a pipeline, a railway or a flood defence needs land, planning consent, surveying and the agreement of the people along its route, that is their work.
The old site undersold them
Their previous site was a WordPress theme with a slider on the front page. Almost every page sat at the top level of the domain, so a news story about wayleaves had an address of exactly the same shape as the page describing what the company does. Nothing in a URL told you where you were, or what sat around it.
The markup underneath didn’t describe the content much better than the URLs did. For a firm that wins multi-year frameworks with grid operators, the site read like a smaller and less experienced business than the one behind it.
Headings that looked exactly like links
The navigation was the hardest part of the build, and it had to be solved twice: once for the header and again for the footer.
The designs drew every menu item the same way. Some of those items were pages you could visit. Others were only labels for a group of pages, with nothing behind them. On screen there was no way to tell the two apart, which sets people up to click on things that do nothing and leaves a screen reader user guessing.
I’d have pushed back on that at the design stage. By the time it reached me, the job was to keep the look as drawn and make the markup carry the difference. In the header, a group that isn’t a page is a button that opens its panel and announces whether it’s open. In the footer it’s a heading over its list of links. Anything you can actually visit is a link.
Structure that matches the business
The new site is organised the way their clients think about a job: what needs doing, in which industry, and where.
Addresses that explain themselves
Services, sectors and regions each have their own branch, nested as deep as the work goes. An address like /sectors/energy/renewable/wind tells you where you are before the page has loaded.
Menus that do what they look like
Links go somewhere and buttons open things, in the header and the footer alike, so the menus work the same with a keyboard or a screen reader as they do with a mouse.
Structure editors can extend
Every service, specialism, sector and region is an entry in Craft, alongside insights, people and the media centre, so adding a new specialism is a content job rather than a development one.
What I did
I built this for Tribes between July and October 2025, as a white-label developer working from their Figma designs. Most of the build was mine: the content model in Craft, the templates and the front end, including both navigations. It wasn’t a solo job, and other developers at Tribes built parts of it, but I wrote more than half of the commits.
It moved quickly. Most of the work was done within ten weeks of the first commit.
