Marketing Gardens
Complete website rebuild for Jesse Harwell's marketing consultancy in Lynchburg, VA. Replaced a Butternut AI template with a fast, SEO-optimized Astro site with real images and structured data.
Project Overview
Jesse Harwell runs Marketing Gardens, a marketing consultancy focused on technology companies (copier dealers, managed IT providers, and tech resellers). His old site was built with Butternut AI: a 1.6 MB HTML page, 7 Google Font families, zero schema markup, and stock photos from Unsplash. It also told visitors it was built by AI, which isn't a great look for a marketing consultant.
We rebuilt the site from scratch using Astro 6 and Tailwind CSS 4. The result is 11 pages with real content, proper heading hierarchy, JSON-LD structured data on every page, and images generated with fal.ai instead of stock photos. Total page weight dropped from 1.6 MB to about 15 KB per page. The site went from zero schema blocks to five, and from blocking all AI search bots to allowing them.
The site includes a services section with detailed descriptions of what Jesse offers (SEO, lead gen, content strategy), a pricing page with three tiers, an about page written in Jesse's voice, a contact form, a blog index, and two case study pages for client projects (Perfect Copier quoting tool and MySEODesk developer portfolio).
Key Features
Schema Markup
JSON-LD on every page: ProfessionalService, Person, Service, OfferCatalog, ContactPage, Article. The old site had zero structured data.
fal.ai Images
8 custom images generated with fal.ai/flux/schnell. No more generic Unsplash stock photos. Each image matches its section context.
Performance
Astro static output, zero client-side JS (except a 500-byte mobile menu toggle), 2 fonts instead of 7. Pages load in under a second.
AI Bot Access
robots.txt allows GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended. The old site blocked all of them via Cloudflare defaults.
Case Studies
Detailed project breakdowns for Perfect Copier (quoting tool) and MySEODesk (developer portfolio), each with sidebar details and CTAs.
Natural Copy
Every page written in a human voice. No "leverage," "empower," or "cutting-edge." The about page reads like Jesse wrote it himself.
