CMS: construction management, credible at a glance

The brief

CMS is Michael Barnes MCIOB: one chartered construction manager with more than thirty-five years in the trade, running luxury residential projects across Chelsea, Mayfair, Kensington, Holland Park and St James's. Work comes by referral from architects, agents and developers, and a referred client looks the firm up before calling, often on a phone.

So the site is there to confirm a referral, not to generate leads. The brief named the audience as the developers and investors who commission these homes and the architects who vet appointments, and the concept put it in one line: the credible individual, not the pretend firm. In a minute or two a visitor should see the projects, what they involved and a private way to get in touch.

What we built

A fully static Astro site of four pages: a home page with a full-screen hero of project photography, an index of eleven projects with place, dates, scope and value where one is confirmed, an about page with Michael's qualifications, and an enquiry form. It was built and deployed on 7 August 2026.

Speed was part of the design. Fonts are self-hosted and cut down to the characters the site uses, which took them from 205KB to 56KB for five faces. Photography is served as AVIF and WebP in fixed-ratio boxes, so nothing shifts, and five of the six hero slides load after the page has; the first build pulled around 800KB before anything painted. The hero headline animates in CSS rather than waiting on JavaScript. The logo is drawn as outlines, which stopped it being the slowest thing to paint and means it works on invoices and headed paper too.

Accuracy was treated the same way. Every figure comes from Michael's own emails; where a project's value could not be confirmed it is left off rather than guessed, and computer-generated images are captioned as renders. The specified secondary text colour measured 3.68:1 against the page, short of the accessibility standard, so it was darkened until it passed. The enquiry form uses a hidden honeypot and spam filtering instead of a CAPTCHA, and emails Michael when someone writes.

Motion is kept to a few signature moments. Anything above the fold animates in CSS, the rest runs on GSAP, and with reduced motion switched on it all settles to still, with nothing left hidden.

How we checked it

Lighthouse, 7 Aug 2026

At handover, on a phone, the home, projects and about pages each scored 100 for performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO, with the largest paint under 1.5 seconds and no layout shift. The thank-you page is kept out of search on purpose.

Lighthouse, 16 Sep 2026

The home page on a phone: performance 99, accessibility 100, best practices 100, SEO 100. On desktop: 100 in all four.

Contrast

Measured, not eyeballed: a script samples the worst background pixel under the hero text across all six slides, at two screen sizes.

Screens and motion

Every page captured at 390, 768 and 1440 pixels wide, then again with reduced motion on, to confirm nothing is left hidden.

Enquiries

Submitted end to end, by direct post and in a real browser, before the test entries were deleted.

What changed

A referral now finds the projects, the facts behind them and a private way to enquire, on the phone they checked from. Anything Michael has not yet confirmed stays off the site and on a written list for him, rather than being guessed at.

The site runs on its Netlify address until the practice's own domain is connected. Michael approved the words below for publication on 16 September 2026.