FAST DEV 24Amerigo: a freight platform's front page, rebuilt from its own material
Demonstration build · concept redesign · one-page site · United Kingdom · see it live
A concept redesign, not a commission. Amerigo is a real company (amerigo.uk) that turns a freight forwarder's Standard Operating Procedure into automation for the whole shipment. We rebuilt their front page from the public material on their site, nothing else. Every figure on the new page is theirs; the one customer quotation is copied from their site and marked as awaiting their confirmation; the phone, the registered address and the company number are placeholders in square brackets, because we do not know them and would not invent them.
What the current site loses
The existing page is a single-page application: 561 KB of HTML with the whole text present twice, no meta description, no image or visual anchor of any kind, no phone number, and a "Request a Demo" button that a machine cannot recognise as a call to action. It is set in one typeface over grids of identical cards, which is what most software sites look like this year. The product underneath is specific and unusual. The page is not.
Four decisions that shaped it
- The pain before the product. A forwarder's page usually opens with the platform. Ours opens with the margin: three to five per cent, defended from an inbox. The reader who recognises that paragraph keeps reading; the one who does not was never the buyer.
- One route instead of three cards. Amerigo serves three parties: the origin agent, the forwarder, the importer. On their site these are three equal cards. On ours they are three points on one drawn route, the shipment travelling from one to the next, which is what the product actually does.
- Their numbers only. Four minutes to a quote against a 67-hour industry average, three times the shipments per employee, £28k of leakage recovered a year: all published by Amerigo. We did not add a single figure, and the page says where the ones it has came from.
- A form that asks for the lane. The demo request asks for the company's busiest lane and monthly volume, so the twenty-minute demo Amerigo promises can run on the prospect's own route. The form posts to a working endpoint; the response time is a marked placeholder until Amerigo sets it.
The numbers
- Audit score
- 100 / 100 on every version: the first grey draft scored 64 because the accent colour on the buttons sat at 4.44:1 contrast against the 4.5 required and two labels on the route diagram ran past the edge on a phone; the final night-harbour version passed clean.
- Independent critique
- Two rounds. The grey draft got 7 / 10 with ten points, all fixed. The night-harbour version with photographs got 4 / 10 on its first screenshots: placeholder-looking icons, one diagram reused three times, the accent colour everywhere, no menu on a phone. All ten were fixed before publication. A separate pass on the text for signs of machine writing found five, also fixed.
- Page weight
- 40 KB of HTML and five photographs, about 390 KB in all. The current amerigo.uk front page is 561 KB before a single image.
- Time
- Inside one working day, from reading their site to a live address.
- What we would charge
- $50 for this scope. Not what was paid; nothing was, and Amerigo has not been asked for anything.
Why a page like this is worth $50
A software company at this stage does not need a site builder or a subscription; it needs one page that a freight director understands in five seconds and can send to a colleague. This one is a single file, loads in well under a second, works in dark mode and on a phone, and every sentence on it can be checked against the company's own material. If Amerigo want it, the file is theirs.