Harlan Transport

Harlan Transport arranges bus hire with a driver for groups across Melbourne and Victoria, from 7 to 57 seats, working with a network of contracted operators. The website it had was built around day tours. The work the business wanted more of, such as worksite and crew transport, corporate shuttles, funerals and airport transfers, had no real home on it.

We measured the old site on 27 September 2026, before the rebuild went live. Its sitemap listed 190 pages. Of the 209 pages that loaded, 137 had no meta description and four had no main heading, the homepage among them in both cases. Another 36 had more than one main heading, and seven items in its own menu led to a page that did not exist. On a phone, a fixed notice bar sat over the menu button.

So the rebuild had two jobs: present the business as group transport, and do it without throwing away what those 190 addresses had earned.

We rebuilt the site from scratch in Next.js as 29 pages: eight vehicle sizes, ten services, five destinations and six others. Twenty-three of them come from data files through one template, so a seat count or a service line is typed once and cannot drift between pages.

The site runs under accuracy rules agreed with the client: nothing invented and nothing inferred. No prices, no street address, no opening hours, no vehicle makes or models, and no claim to own vehicles, because Harlan works with contracted operators and says so. We wrote those rules as an audit that reads the finished pages, including the structured data and the image descriptions, and fails on any breach. It checks 11 rules across every rendered page. Where the approved facts held no answer to a common question, the question was left out instead of padded.

The quote form does the sizing for the customer. It asks how many people are travelling and suggests the vehicle, counting the driver's seat: 21 passengers means a 25 seater. One table of rules decides which questions each of six trip types asks, from a one-way run to a Melbourne Airport transfer with a flight number. If an enquiry cannot be delivered, the customer is told and given the phone number, so nothing fails silently. Sixty-six automated tests cover the form, the email it sends and the redirects.

Before launch, not after, every address on the old site was mapped to its closest new page: 119 permanent redirects covering all 190 addresses in the old sitemap, plus six more that Search Console knew and the sitemap had missed. An old winery tour lands on the Yarra Valley page, not on the homepage, and a test proves that every old address reaches a real page.