Where flour meets flowers in Akasia, Pretoria North
The Challenge: A whole farm’s worth of offerings and no website
Meelblom is a smallholding in Akasia that becomes a little market over weekends. Visitors come to cut their own flowers and herbs, buy handmade sourdough bread, browse a rail of pre-loved clothing, or join a sourdough baking workshop. During the week, the farm hosts and caters celebrations: baby showers, bridal showers, birthday parties, and other events.
We assisted the client to register their domain in their own name, with development to follow. The client had no specific design in mind, only a logo pack from her graphic artist, a custom font, a set of patchwork flower illustrations, and photographs taken from her very successful Facebook page. The challenge was to bring nine very different services together on one site without it feeling cluttered, and to make it look unmistakably like Meelblom.
The Solution: Designing around the brand she already had
We built the site from scratch in plain HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP, with no page builders and no plugins. The colour palette was sampled directly from her logo, the custom script font is used for the headings, and the patchwork flowers float through the page as illustrations. The result is a single, flowing home page with About, Services, Garden, Gallery, and Contact sections, plus a footer that ties it all together.
The photographs posed a problem: having come from Facebook, they were only 414 pixels wide. We enlarged and sharpened them with AI-based super resolution to three times their original size, then generated two lightweight WebP versions of each, so every browser downloads only the size it needs, greatly assisting the speed at which the content is served.
Everything a small business needs, built in
- A contact form that asks which service the visitor is interested in and on which date, and delivers a neatly formatted enquiry email straight to the owner’s inbox.
- A Google map with directions to the farm, plus click-to-call and click-to-email links.
- A site search, and share buttons for WhatsApp, Facebook, Pinterest, X, and email, without any tracking plugins.
- A privacy policy compliant with POPIA, plus terms and conditions and a disclaimer written with the Consumer Protection Act in mind.
- Structured data, meta tags, and a sitemap, so Google understands what Meelblom offers and where it is.
- A link to the client’s other business, Chamo Dance and Fitness, which shares the same property.
The Result: A site the client is over the moon about
The client loved the first draft. Once we had worked through the SEObility recommendations, the site’s score went from the 67% it scored before any quality checking, to 92% after the first round of checks. Every page passes the W3C HTML validator without errors. The site is verified with Google Search Console, and Meelblom now has an online home as warm and handmade as the farm itself. The concept we put on the table has also opened up opportunities that the client had not considered before. This is why we are a consulting business. We offer assistance, sometimes really small things, that have a massive effect on the success of your business, maybe taking you in directions you had not considered before.
What remains now is for the website to improve its 92% SEO rating through increased backlinks. This will follow and takes time to do.