Page count against readability

Trane UK hire out temperature control equipment. Facilities managers arrive because something has already broken. Someone planning a purchase wants specification and lead times. The same pages have to do both.

The information architecture runs on two axes at once, equipment and market, over a single page skeleton. I took it from wireframes to hi-fi with the structure proven in greyscale, so the arguments about hierarchy happened before anyone was defending a colour.

The client wanted a landing page for every equipment type in every market, twenty pages, argued for by a separate search agency with real evidence behind it. I wanted fewer, because twenty near-identical pages are bad for anyone reading them.

We shipped nine, with Solutions absorbing the equipment terms and Markets absorbing the sector terms. Their version protected the search surface. Mine protected the reading experience and gave up more traffic than the business could afford. Theirs was better.

The site produced over £100k in sales within a few months. No baseline was given, and the client credits search.