AI for Cornwall
AI for Cornwall is a website and brand built from a simple observation: AI stopped being optional. You can visit the live site at the end of this page.
The Idea
Over the past few years I’ve watched AI shift from a novelty into something I use every day in my own work — and I’ve watched most people around me either ignore that shift entirely or feel overwhelmed by it. Neither felt right. The businesses I know best — small teams in Cornwall, tradespeople, hospitality owners, local charities — are exactly the people this technology could genuinely help, and exactly the people least likely to have someone explain it to them without a sales pitch attached.
So I built AI for Cornwall: a local AI consultancy offering training, workflow support, readiness audits and policy guidance to businesses across the region. This project covers the full brand and website behind it — designed, written and built from scratch.
The Challenge
Launch a credible, locally-rooted AI consultancy from nothing — brand, information architecture, copy and a production website — for an audience that’s often cautious about AI, allergic to jargon, and unimpressed by hype. It needed to look and feel trustworthy to a hospitality owner and a professional services firm alike, rank for real local search intent, and generate qualified enquiries from day one.
What I Built
- Full site architecture — home, a four-service hub (AI Readiness Audit, Training & Workshops, Workflow Support, Policy Guidance), a resources/guides library, about, contact, and supporting legal pages, mapped against a keyword plan targeting Cornwall-specific AI search intent.
- Hand-coded WordPress theme — no page builder. Every template, the design system, and the CSS is hand-written PHP/CSS, giving full control over performance and design rather than fighting a visual builder’s constraints.
- Brand identity — a navy, teal and coral colour system built around the Cornish chough (Cornwall’s heraldic bird), paired with a warm, confident type system (Baloo 2 for display, Inter for body copy).
- SEO & structured data — per-page schema.org markup (ProfessionalService, Service, FAQPage, Article, BreadcrumbList), managed meta titles/descriptions, and a clean information architecture designed around how people actually search for local AI help.
- Lead capture that works — a contact form wired through proper SMTP delivery (diagnosing and fixing a shared-hosting mail delivery issue along the way, including SPF configuration), so enquiries reliably reach the inbox instead of vanishing.
- Privacy-respecting analytics — GA4 implemented behind a genuine cookie-consent gate, so tracking only fires when a visitor actually opts in, not before.
- Fully responsive, accessibility-aware build — mobile navigation, reduced-motion handling, and iterative fixes driven by real device testing rather than just desktop previews.
The Approach
The whole build was iterative rather than a single big reveal: draft, deploy, screenshot, refine. Design direction was shaped by studying reference sites the client responded to, then adapting the strongest ideas — bold typography, organic section transitions, considered use of colour — into something that still felt restrained and trustworthy for a local consultancy audience, rather than copying any one aesthetic wholesale.
The Result
A live, fully functioning consultancy website that practices what it preaches: AI was used throughout the build process itself — for planning, copywriting, design iteration and problem-solving — while every piece of business content, pricing language and service detail was kept honest and grounded in what the business actually offers. No invented stats, no fabricated testimonials, no AI hype. Just a practical, well-built site for a practical, well-built service.
Tech stack: WordPress (hand-coded theme, no page builder), PHP, vanilla CSS/JS, Ninja Forms, Google Analytics 4.