Sibbalds. A new brand, a new website and a new office, launched together.

Our first emails with Sibbalds date from January 2012, when we sorted out the hosting for their old website. In 2015 we built them a new one in WordPress, and from the end of that year we took on their newsletters and local search as well.

The 2015 site was built around the people Sibbalds help. Visitors chose what best described them, a start-up, an established business, or individuals and trusts, and each route led to a named director. Client stories, with photographs we took at the clients’ own premises, the firm’s eight promises and a page for anyone thinking of changing accountant did the rest.

Since December 2015 we’ve produced Sibbalds’ newsletters: a monthly round-up of tax and business news, and Pay Less Tax, a tax-planning edition several times a year. They’ve moved with the firm from its own email system to Mailchimp in 2018 and ActiveCampaign in 2021. When the pandemic hit in 2020, client updates went out the day they were written, by email, on the website and on social media at once.

From 2016 we worked on local search too. The firm was listed online under several old names and addresses, so we corrected them and built new listings. By October 2016 a search for “Derbyshire tax return” had moved from beyond 50th to third in Google Maps, and by April 2017 there were 425 listings live.

The firm’s events got the same care: a promo video for its Making Tax Digital seminar, and for the Midlands Better Business Expo in 2019, stand panels, leaflets, a presentation and branded chocolate bars.

In 2019 Sibbalds asked us for a plan for their next website. Our proposal started with an audit rather than a design: what the firm wanted to be known for, who it wanted to reach, what clients asked most, and what competitors were doing, from their reviews to how they organised their services.

It set out a site organised around clients rather than a list of services: pages for the kinds and sizes of business the firm wanted more of, real client stories and reviews matched to each service, and a free consultation offered throughout. For new subjects it proposed a hub and spoke: one main page on a topic such as Making Tax Digital, with guides, articles, a short video and client stories around it, built up over six months.

From the 2019 proposal to the 2025 website.

The directors accepted it in November 2019. It took longer to reach the screen than anyone planned, but its shape is the shape of the site that launched.

The brief was gentle: no change to the name, maybe a slight change to the logo. We moved the firm away from its purple S. The 2020 mark was an arrow made of pixels, pointing up at 45 degrees with a hint of a rocket: growth, with a nod to the cloud accounting the firm was championing. The name went into lower case, in a simple geometric typeface, to feel approachable, and the purple got brighter.

In 2024, with the new website taking shape, the directors weren’t sure about the mark sitting above the name. They sketched a bolder arrow of their own, and we developed it, alongside a sheet of other arrow ideas to compare. The final mark was agreed in June 2024: the same lower-case name, a purple dot on the i, and a solid corner arrow pointing up and to the right. It works in colour, in white over photographs, in one colour and as a square icon.

Jay Durow restarted the website project in February 2024 with the firm’s new vision and values. We worked out the content and site map in shared documents, the directors commented on the design directly in Figma, and the staging site was reviewed with comments pinned to the page rather than long email chains. We wrote the service pages, building on the old site and the firm’s own notes.

The site starts from who you are. Ambitious start-ups, growing businesses, mature businesses and family businesses each have a way in, alongside the services, the team, the five values and the eight challenges business owners bring to an accountant, from cash flow to planning an exit.

The opening shot is Derby, filmed from the air by a local photographer, rather than stock footage. Sibbalds liked the large animated intro on another firm’s website. We argued for subtle movement and clear calls to action instead: an animation that size fixes the top of the homepage in place, and the budget was better spent on content.

The website was finished early in 2025. Sibbalds were then negotiating to become the anchor tenants of the University of Derby’s new Business School building, so they held the site and the new brand back to launch them together with the move.

On 16 December 2025 the new site went live at 9:40. The email to clients announcing the rebrand, the website and the move followed at 10:19, and the first enquiry through the new site came the next day. Around the launch, and in the months after it, the new brand went everywhere else:

• Email signatures, with a link to the news
• Letterhead, with the arrow as a watermark
• The Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and Facebook, with the new address
• A QR code that takes visitors straight to the new car park
• Roller banners, artwork for a wall mural and logos for the building’s tenant board

Each month the firm sends its tax and business news, and we turn it into posts on the website, an email to clients and posts on LinkedIn and Facebook, often the same day. Since January 2026 the newsletter has been published as posts rather than PDFs, so readers don’t have to download anything and every article can be found in search.

In September 2026 we audited the whole site: page titles that ran too long went from 152 to 33, 83 pages got new descriptions for Google, the firm’s new address went into the structured data search engines read, broken links were fixed, and analytics were reconnected behind the cookie consent.