F2 Recruitment

F2 Recruitment is an owner-run driving, logistics and industrial recruitment agency in Bolton, serving employers and workers across Greater Manchester. I designed and built its website, host it, and set up the search groundwork, so the business has a site its owners can run without calling me for every change.

It is a WordPress site with a custom theme: bold pink and black, large type, and built to be used on a phone, because most people looking for driving and warehouse work will be.

A recruitment agency lives on two audiences at once: employers who want reliable staff, and workers who want to see what is available and apply quickly. The site had to speak to both without making either dig for what they came for.

The owners also needed to control it themselves. Jobs change weekly, the wording on the home page changes with the season, and they should not need a developer to add a vacancy. At the same time, a job board is only useful if search engines can read it, so the structure behind the pages mattered as much as the look.

• Two clear paths from the first screen. The home page leads with “I’m looking for staff” and “I’m looking for work”, and a Register for work button and a WhatsApp button follow the visitor down the page.
• Jobs as the centre. Vacancies live on one filterable Jobs page, with a page for each job that can be found on its own.
• Owners in control. Day-to-day content is something the owners edit, not something I do for them.
• Plain about who they are. The site says what the agency is: independent, owner-run and PAYE-only, with temporary and temp-to-perm work.

• Custom theme: a bespoke WordPress theme in pink and black, written for this site rather than adapted from a template.
• Job board: the owners add a job with an advert image, its details and an apply link, and it appears on the Jobs page. Visitors can filter by driver class and area. Closed jobs drop off the list and out of the sitemap by themselves.
• Two ways to respond: Apply goes to the agency’s Recruso registration form. A separate “Already registered? Express interest” button opens WhatsApp with the job already named.
• Edit it yourself: the home page text, headings, buttons and each page’s header image are edited from one admin screen.
• Reviews: a live Google reviews widget on the home page, using the free Trustindex plugin with no account needed.
• Fast and light: WebP images, caching and compression, with no page image over about 216 KB.
• Spam-protected forms: the enquiry forms are protected against spam.

• Search appearance box on every page: the owners can set each page’s title and description themselves, so SEO stays under their control after hand-over.
• Structured data: organisation details, JobPosting for every live job (so jobs can be eligible for Google’s job listings), FAQ and breadcrumbs.
• Crawl basics: an XML sitemap, clean redirects to a single canonical address, and a title and description on each page.
• In Google: the site now appears in Google search results with sitelinks under the main result.

• Platform: WordPress with a custom theme and a small custom plugin for the job board.
• Hosting: on my own server behind nginx, with HTTPS, security hardening and nightly off-site backups.
• Privacy: a cookie consent banner and a privacy policy. Analytics are self-hosted Umami, which is cookieless, and records visits and clicks on the register, WhatsApp and apply buttons.
• Services delivered: web design, build, hosting, technical SEO and analytics set-up.