How Redgate Plant Hire was built

Palette — argued from the yard at 6:45 a.m.

Light industrial, steel and machine orange. The ground is yard concrete, the ink is gunmetal, and the orange is spent exactly where a hire yard spends it — on the machines and on the things you're meant to touch. Drafting blue does the annotating, the way a spec sheet would.

The ink/line split rule applies: orange and blue draw lines and marks; body copy always sits in gunmetal (13.2:1 on the concrete), and the blue used for link text is the darker #3A576F variant at 6.0:1.

Type — the board at the yard gate

Anton carries the display: it's the block-caps face of rate boards and machine decals, so the day rate gets set huge in it — $290 / DAY — exactly like the sign you'd read from the ute. Work Sans does the working text: legible, plain-spoken, comfortable at 16.5px body size with tabular numerals wherever money lines up.

Signature — the Hire Ledger & Yard Row

Three machine chips select a procedurally drawn SVG side elevation — every machine is paths and primitives, no raster anywhere — annotated with drafting-blue dimension callouts (dig depth, overall width, operating weight) that draw themselves in like a pen on film: each line's getTotalLength() seeds a dash offset animated to zero, with labels and arrowheads fading in after their line lands. The draw is dual-speed — full entrance choreography on first paint, ~500 ms snappy on every subsequent machine swap — and each render captures a token that the animation frames check, bumped in the chip handler before the state swap, so a rapid string of chip taps can never leave a stale draw writing onto the wrong machine.

Beside it, the ledger prices the hire live: a 1–7 day stepper with the 3+ day tier applying from exactly day three, a $35-per-charged-day damage waiver toggled on by default (with the honest alternative — your insurer's certificate of currency — on the card), and delivery chips at the flat $95-each-way metro rate. A week is 7 days' possession charged as 5, stated on the board. The $500 bond is itemised as its own $0-impact line because it's a pre-authorisation, not a charge; fuel carries an at-cost declaration wherever the total appears; and attachments print no number at all — they're quoted with the machine, and pretending otherwise would be the dishonest choice. The excavator's boom cycles a slow dig arc via rAF (paused when the tab hides, absent under reduced motion, where the dims render pre-drawn and settled).

The chosen machine, duration and delivery pre-fill the booking form, so the demo interaction becomes a warmer enquiry — and the form's own machine and days fields drive the ledger right back.

The rates the ledger runs on

All dry hire, GST inclusive, argued from the Perth market. The estimator's cheapest output for each machine equals the services grid's "from" floor.

Worked rest state, measured from the running page: excavator × 2 days ($580) + waiver 2 × $35 ($70) + delivery both ways ($190) = $840 + fuel at cost, bond shown and excluded. The tier boundary was driven on both sides: 2 days holds the day rate ($580 hire), 3 days books at $260 ($780 hire, $1,075 total with waiver and delivery); the week lands at $1,665; waiver off at the rest scenario reads $770.

Conversion decisions

• Ledger in the hero. The signature shares the first screen with the value proposition at 1200×750 — a hire customer's first question is "what does a weekend cost", so the answer is the second thing they see.
• Call and book, always reachable. tel: link in the masthead (collapsing to an orange CALL pill under 420px), a sticky call/book bar on mobile, and the big phone number repeated beside the form for people who'd rather talk.
• Form fields are the booking, nothing more. Name, phone, suburb, machine, start date, days — the exact set the counter needs to confirm a float slot. The ledger pre-fills machine and days; validation is native with visible focus rings; the confirmation panel is local, honest about being a demo, and repeats the ledger figure with the fuel declaration.
• Honesty as trust furniture. The bond line that adds $0, the waiver's insurer alternative, the fuel-at-cost declaration, and the "quoted with the machine" attachments line all model how an honest yard talks — which is the sales pitch to the yard owner watching.

Local SEO we'd implement for the real business

The demo page ships only WebPage schema naming it a demonstration — fictional structured data in a real index would be dishonest markup. For a real yard we'd ship LocalBusiness markup like this, populated from their actual details and live reviews feed:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "LocalBusiness",
  "name": "Redgate Plant Hire",
  "description": "Dry-hire excavators, skid steers and attachments —
    Kenwick yard, Perth metro delivery.",
  "telephone": "+61-8-XXXX-XXXX",
  "url": "https://example-real-domain.com.au",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "(real street address)",
    "addressLocality": "Kenwick",
    "addressRegion": "WA",
    "postalCode": "6107",
    "addressCountry": "AU"
  },
  "geo": { "@type": "GeoCoordinates", "latitude": -32.03, "longitude": 115.97 },
  "openingHoursSpecification": [
    { "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
      "dayOfWeek": ["Monday","Tuesday","Wednesday","Thursday","Friday"],
      "opens": "06:30", "closes": "16:30" },
    { "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
      "dayOfWeek": "Saturday", "opens": "07:00", "closes": "12:00" }
  ],
  "priceRange": "$230–$290 per day",
  "areaServed": { "@type": "City", "name": "Perth" },
  "makesOffer": [
    { "@type": "Offer",
      "itemOffered": { "@type": "Service", "name": "1.7 t excavator dry hire" },
      "priceSpecification": { "@type": "UnitPriceSpecification",
        "price": 290, "priceCurrency": "AUD", "unitText": "day" } }
  ],
  "aggregateRating": { "@type": "AggregateRating",
    "ratingValue": "4.9", "reviewCount": "87" }
}

Why the parent type: schema.org has no equipment-rental subtype of LocalBusiness — the Store branch's closest members don't describe dry hire — so the honest, correct pick is the top-level LocalBusiness itself rather than shoehorning a wrong subtype. Rating and offer values above are placeholders; on the real build they come from the client's review platform and rate card.

What changes for the real client

Their fleet photos can replace or sit beside the procedural elevations (though the drawings make a genuinely good spec-sheet aesthetic); the availability strip stops being demo copy and reads from their hire-management system — Point of Rental, MCS-rm, Baseplan or HireHop all expose the yard sheet — and the booking form posts into the same system's reservation API with an SMS confirmation. Reviews feed from Google Business Profile. Rates become their rate card, delivery pricing gets their float zones, and Xero picks up the invoicing. The ledger logic itself ships as-is: it's their pricing, just honest and on the page.

Iteration log