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Case Study

Hill Brook Barn

A calm, premium holiday-let website built for direct enquiries — launched fast, scored 100/100 on Lighthouse accessibility and SEO.

12

Days to launch

100

Lighthouse SEO score

100

Accessibility score

1

Week from brief to build

Hill Brook Barn website — homepage hero section

The Hill Brook Barn homepage hero — live at hillbrookbarn.com

The Challenge

A premium stay needs a premium website.

Hill Brook Barn is a countryside holiday let in the Ribble Valley — a premium escape near Pendle Hill. The owners needed a website that would do justice to the property and the setting.

For a holiday-let website, visitors are making a trust decision. They want to know what the place is like, who it suits, where it is, what facilities are included, and how to enquire about dates. If those details are unclear, even a beautiful property can lose enquiries.

The brief was refreshingly straightforward:

  • Show the barn and countryside setting in a polished, premium way.
  • Make the offer easy to understand on mobile and desktop.
  • Guide visitors towards direct enquiries — not booking-platform clutter.
  • Use the correct production domain and public email address from day one.
  • Be technically strong enough for search engines, visitors and AI assistants to understand.
Fehu's Approach

Build, verify, hand over.

01 Clear positioning

The website positions Hill Brook Barn as a premium countryside escape, with content focused on the property, the setting, and the type of stay guests can expect. The copy avoids vague filler and instead gives visitors useful information: the barn, the rooms, the hot tub, the local countryside, and the route to enquire.

02 Direct enquiry focus

The site was designed around enquiries rather than a heavy booking system. Visitors can use the dedicated contact form or email hello@hillbrookbarn.com directly. That keeps the site simple, fast, and focused while giving potential guests a clear next step.

03 Fast, static build

Built as a static website using Astro. For a project like this, a static build is the right fit: quick to load, reliable to host, and easier to keep secure than an unnecessarily heavy CMS. The entire site went from brief to production in under two weeks.

04 Search and AI readiness

Every Fehu build ships with the technical foundations that help search engines and AI assistants understand the site. For Hill Brook Barn that meant:

  • Correct canonical domain setup for https://hillbrookbarn.com
  • XML sitemap and robots.txt
  • Search-friendly page titles and meta descriptions
  • Structured data for the accommodation context
  • Clear crawlable content — no hidden app-only information
  • Visible contact and enquiry routes on every page

05 Quality verification

Before handover, we ran accessibility and quality checks — contrast fixes, heading structure, form validation — and verified everything with Lighthouse. The final launch scores:

Mobile

Performance91
Accessibility100
Best Practices100
SEO100

Desktop

Performance100
Accessibility100
Best Practices100
SEO100
What Was Delivered

Everything a small-business website needs.

Polished homepage

Presenting the barn, the setting and the guest experience

Responsive design

Optimised for mobile, tablet and desktop

Contact & enquiry page

Dedicated form with working Netlify submission

Business email

hello@hillbrookbarn.com for direct enquiries

Image-led gallery

Showcasing the property and surroundings

SEO foundations

Canonical URLs, sitemap, robots.txt, structured data

Accessibility checks

Contrast, headings, form labels — all verified

Customer handover pack

Plain-English guide to managing the site

The Result

A launch-ready digital home.

Hill Brook Barn launched with a website that feels calm, polished and practical. It does the job a good small-business website should do:

  • It explains the offer quickly.
  • It helps visitors trust what they are seeing.
  • It gives clear routes to enquire.
  • It works properly on mobile.
  • It is technically clean enough for launch.
  • It gives the client a clear handover rather than leaving them with a mystery system.

The result is a launch-ready digital home for Hill Brook Barn: fast, accessible, search-ready and built around direct guest enquiries.

Why This Matters

A modern website should not just look finished. It should be operationally ready.

For us, that means checking the things that often get missed at launch:

  • Does the real domain match the site's SEO settings?
  • Does the contact form actually submit?
  • Are placeholder links removed?
  • Is the site readable on mobile?
  • Can a search engine or AI assistant understand the business?
  • Does the customer have a plain-English handover pack?

Hill Brook Barn is a good example of the Fehu approach: design, build, verify, hand over, and make the site useful from day one.

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