Work · Financial services · Perth
Pura Finance Group asked us to make some changes to their website. Within an hour it was clear the changes were not the point.
The business had commissioned a website from a previous developer and been handed the keys without the knowledge that comes with them. What they had was a purchased page-builder template that had never been fully de-templated — the demo content was still in place, underneath a coat of paint.
That is a common enough story. What made this one urgent is that Pura Finance Group is a credit representative operating under an Australian Credit Licence. Several of the things sitting on that site were not cosmetic problems. They were representations a licensee has to be able to stand behind.
So the first job was not design. It was working out what had to come off the site that day.
A placeholder sat where the licence number belongs, in the footer of every page. For a credit representative that is a disclosure failure, not a typo.
99% approval. 8,900 happy customers. $90K in daily payments. A 99.9% success rate guarantee. All template filler, all live on a regulated business.
Different names, the same job title, stock avatars. Demo content shipped with the template and never replaced.
The template vendor’s brand appeared twice on the homepage, describing the services as though it were them.
Placeholder Latin sitting where each service description should have been.
It reported success on every submission. The messages were accepted and silently discarded. Enquiries had been going missing since launch.
Three documents a credit representative is expected to make available. None were published.
Across every page checked. Search engines had almost nothing to work with.
On a business where most traffic arrives on a phone, the number could not be tapped to dial.
Fabricated numbers on a credit licensee’s website are not a copywriting problem.
Approval rates and customer counts are representations. Invented testimonials are misleading conduct. A placeholder where a licence number belongs is a disclosure failure. None of it had been put there deliberately — it arrived with the template — but it was published, and it was live.
Deletions only, no design work. The fabricated statistics, the three invented testimonials, the other company’s name, the lorem ipsum, a line offering student lending they do not provide. Nothing here needed a decision — it needed removing, and it was gone the same afternoon.
We traced the licensing chain properly — the licensee, the Australian Credit Licence, both credit representative numbers, AFCA and FBAA memberships — and verified every figure against the AFCA register and the client’s own documents before publishing any of it. Then the contact form, which turned out to be a longer story.
The template was fighting every change. We rebuilt the site by hand — eleven pages, no page builder, no plugin stack — with the copy written around what the business actually does: asset and equipment finance for sole traders, companies, trusts and partnerships.
Every submission returned a success message. Nothing ever arrived. The obvious suspects — spam folder, wrong address, a misconfigured plugin — all came back clean.
The delivery log told the real story: zero records. The messages were not failing to deliver, they were never entering a queue that delivers. The domain’s mail runs on Microsoft 365, but the web host was accepting mail for it locally and dropping it into a mailbox that did not exist.
At that point the right call is to stop debugging someone else’s mail server. We moved the enquiry pipeline onto an email API we could observe, on a dedicated sending subdomain so the client’s Microsoft 365 configuration was never touched. Every enquiry is now written to disk before the send is attempted, so a delivery failure can never again cost them a lead silently.
Eleven hand-built pages with a single H1 and a unique description each — previously there were none of either. Licensing disclosure that is correct and verified. A Credit Guide page, a complaints and dispute resolution page naming AFCA, and a privacy policy written for the site rather than borrowed from one.
Every address from the old site — eight of them — redirects permanently to its replacement, so no bookmark and no search result was lost on the day of the switch. The changeover took under an hour, with the previous site left intact and reversible for a fortnight afterwards.
And the enquiry form delivers, which it had not been doing for as long as anyone could establish.
The brief said “make some changes to the website”. The job was a compliance audit that happened to end in a rebuild.
Most engagements are like this. The brief describes the symptom.
