Business · Live client site
First Experts Logistics Solutions
A ground-up rebuild of the corporate website for a Lagos-based freight forwarding and customs clearance company established in 2005, replacing an outdated WordPress build with a fast, modern, hand-coded site.
The challenge
The company's existing site ran on an aging WordPress build that no longer reflected the scale or credibility of a logistics firm that has been operating since 2005. It was slow, dated, and didn't give visitors service pages clear enough to understand freight forwarding, customs clearance, air and sea cargo, or warehousing at a glance.
The approach
I rebuilt the site from scratch as a hand-coded, static, responsive site rather than patching the WordPress install, then kept redesigning it in phases well past launch, handling everything from information architecture to layout to deployment myself, on top of running the company's day-to-day social media.
Earlier version & latest redesign
This hand-coded rebuild replaced the company's original WordPress site (built by a previous developer, no longer around to screenshot). What's shown here is an earlier pass of my own rebuild (left) next to the latest redesign (right), same company, same content, still evolving in phases.
Earlier pass
Latest redesign
Design
A cleaner service-first structure, with dedicated sections for each core offering, real company photography replacing every stock image, and a bold animated hero built to read clearly on both desktop and mobile without relying on a page builder's default styling.
Development
Built with plain HTML5, Tailwind CSS, and vanilla JavaScript, with no framework and no CMS, across 24 pages: services, dedicated air/sea/customs/door-to-door pages, routes, a real four-post blog, shipment tracking, and legal pages, all optimized down to compressed JPG/WebP images.
What I solved
- Full migration off WordPress to a hand-coded, fast-loading responsive build.
- Service pages covering freight forwarding, customs clearance, air and sea cargo, door-to-door, and warehousing, plus a real four-article blog and a shipment tracking page.
- Every stock photo replaced with real company photography, resized and compressed for fast load times.
- Ongoing ownership of both the site and the company's social media presence, with the site itself redesigned in phases well past its first launch.
Result
It's live now at firstexpertslogistics.com. This is the one that's actually paying my bills, not a portfolio exercise, a real client who has to be happy with it every time they send someone the link.
Everything in the box
24 pages, covering the full range of what a logistics client actually needs online:
Services
- Dedicated pages for air freight, sea freight, customs clearance, door-to-door, haulage, and e-commerce logistics, plus a general services and solutions overview
- A routes page mapping the company's actual shipping lanes
Lead generation
- A dedicated quote request page, a thank-you confirmation page, and a shipment tracking page
- Contact page with a working form, and an FAQ page answering common client questions
Content & credibility
- A real four-post blog: air vs. sea freight, customs clearance explained, FCL vs. LCL, and a quote checklist
- An insights page and an about page covering the company's history since 2005
The essentials
- Privacy policy and terms pages, and a custom, properly styled 404 page instead of a broken default
- Real company photography throughout, replacing every stock image from the original build
Under the hood
A few of the details I'm genuinely proud of, since they're easy to miss just from screenshots:
- A live exchange-rate ticker on the homepage. USD→NGN, EUR→NGN, and GBP→NGN, pulled from Frankfurter's real exchange-rate API with a single request, then the EUR and GBP rows derived as standard currency cross-rates from that same response instead of three separate calls. Numbers count up from zero on load instead of just appearing, cached for the session so a page refresh doesn't re-fetch needlessly, and if the fetch ever fails it shows an honest "rates unavailable" line rather than a fabricated number.
- Shipment tracking with zero backend. The Tracking page reads live data straight from a published Google Sheet exported as CSV, parsed with a small hand-written parser built to handle quoted fields with commas in them. No server, no database, just a spreadsheet the team can update directly.
- Automatic carrier detection for tracking numbers that aren't ours. Paste in a tracking number and it's pattern-matched against the real formats UPS, FedEx, DHL Express, national postal services, Maersk, and MSC actually use, then links out to the right carrier. FedEx numbers link straight to a pre-filled result; the others link to the carrier's real tracking page rather than guessing a URL format that might be stale.
- Quote and contact forms wired to Web3Forms, with the quote form capturing shipping mode, origin, destination, cargo type, weight/volume, preferred pickup date, and company details in one structured submission that lands straight in an inbox, no backend required.
- A "network pulse" widget that reuses the same tracking spreadsheet to show a genuine live count of shipments in the system, rather than a second, separate data source just for a homepage widget.
Screens
