Private Capital Management

The Challenge

Private Capital Management is a privately owned Sydney firm with three divisions: wealth management and financial planning, mortgage broking, and personal insurance. Their old site ran on WordPress and had seven real pages.

The problem wasn’t a shortage of content. It was where the content was kept. The wealth management page alone ran to about 13,000 words, most of it in 26 FAQ accordions of 400 to 700 words each. The mortgage broking page had another 25. It was the largest body of the firm’s own writing anywhere, and it was all folded shut on two pages, where neither a reader nor Google could make much of it.

There was a second constraint that shaped everything: this is a licensed financial services firm. Every figure, claim and testimonial on the site has to be one the firm can stand behind, under its licensee. That ruled out the usual shortcuts.

The Solution

Design concepts, then the client’s own arrangement

The design started as a round of five homepage concepts. The client didn’t pick one. They took pieces of two, arranged them their own way and sent the result back as a screenshot. That became the homepage: one deep blue that opens and closes every page, with white, grey and near-black in between.

A second round settled the service pages. The option chosen keeps each service’s sub-pages in a column down the left at every depth, with the page you’re on marked. Someone reading about SMSFs can always see that retirement planning and estate planning sit right next to it.

Sixteen service pages from two

The three services each have a hub, and beneath them sit thirteen sub-service pages. Wealth management covers retirement planning, SMSF, investment strategy, estate planning and tax planning. Mortgage broking covers first home buyers, investment property loans and refinancing. Insurance covers life, TPD, trauma, income protection and business expense cover.

They’re built from the firm’s own copy, recovered from those accordions and sorted by the question the reader is actually asking. On mortgage broking, for example, the 25 accordions turned out to be three different things wearing one label: loan structures, government schemes and packages for specific professions. Each now lives in its own place, and nothing appears twice.

Careful with the numbers

Some of the old copy couldn’t come across as written. Contribution caps it quoted had since risen. A quoted performance figure and a fee comparison were claims the firm would need to substantiate. Where a number couldn’t be confirmed as current, the page explains the concept without it rather than publishing a stale figure on a licensed firm’s site.

The same care applies to credentials. The wealth and insurance pages show the firm’s AFSL details, and the mortgage pages show its credit licence. Neither division’s licence ever appears on the other’s pages.

Moving without losing anything

Every URL the old site exposed was crawled, from its sitemaps, its internal links and Google’s index. The seven main pages kept their addresses, and everything else redirects to its new home. The old blog posts were kept, word for word, ready for when the news section opens.

The site is built on Astro: static, no database, no plugins to patch and no admin login to attack. The enquiry form emails the firm and sends the visitor a confirmation, and GA4 tracks completed enquiries, booking clicks and calls without recording anything a visitor types.

The Results

The site launched on 7 October 2026.

• Sixteen service pages, up from three, built from the firm’s own writing
• A design the client arranged from two rounds of concepts
• No stale figures on a regulated firm’s site
• Every old URL accounted for, so nothing that already ranked was thrown away
• A WordPress site retired for a static one with nothing to patch

It’s too early for enquiry or ranking data to mean anything. When there’s something worth reporting, I’ll add it here.