KPM First Aid Training — website rebuild

Independent first aid and lifesaving trainer, Newcastle upon Tyne. Full rebuild of a dated website, launched 2026.

Visit the live site →

The client

KPM First Aid Training is run by Karen Patterson, an RLSS UK National Trainer Assessor and a ProTrainings UK Gold Approved Centre. She delivers workplace, paediatric and specialist first aid qualifications, aquatic rescue awards and trainer assessor courses across Newcastle, North Tyneside, Northumberland and the wider North East, at the customer’s workplace or a suitable venue.

The problem

The old site undersold all of that. It was dated, hard to use on a phone, and didn’t give people a clear route from “I need a first aid course” to “here’s how I book one”. The qualifications and accreditations that matter to an employer weren’t front and centre.

What I built

• Custom WordPress theme, built from scratch. No page builder, so the pages load quickly and there’s nothing bolted on to slow them down.
• KPM Site Core plugin, a custom plugin that holds the courses, reviews, enquiry form, business details and structured data. The content lives in the plugin, not the theme, so it survives any future redesign.
• Course pages laid out for the person booking: what the course is, who it’s for, how long it takes, how to enquire.
• RLSS UK training section for aquatic rescue awards, trainer assessor courses, mentoring and quality assurance.
• Reviews and gallery pages, plus a community training page.
• Enquiry form with proper spam protection, and a cookie consent set-up that only asks for what the site actually uses.
• Image optimisation handled properly so the photo-heavy pages stay fast on mobile.

Launch done properly

• Redirects: every page on the old site was mapped and 301-redirected to its replacement, so existing Google results kept working from day one.
• Google Search Console set up and verified for the client’s own Google account, so Karen can see how the site performs without going through me.
• Mobile performance: built and tested phone-first, because that’s where most of her customers are.

Before and after

What Karen said

“Absolutely made up with my new website! George at SR7 Web Design has done an amazing job. He was incredibly patient with all my tweaks and changes and made sure everything was exactly how I wanted it. Nothing was too much trouble and I couldn’t be happier with the finished result.”

Karen Patterson, KPM First Aid Training — Google review

Under the bonnet

The theme is hand-written PHP and CSS with no page builder, so there is nothing sitting between the visitor and the page. The business content — courses, reviews, enquiries, contact details and structured data — lives in the KPM Site Core plugin rather than the theme, which means a future redesign cannot take it with it.

• Custom post types for courses and for enquiries, so course details are structured data rather than paragraphs somebody has to keep consistent by hand.
• Structured data published as JSON-LD describing the business, the areas covered and the training catalogue, so search engines can read what KPM offers rather than guess at it.
• Legacy URL redirects held in the plugin, so links from the old site keep working.
• Responsive images in modern formats, sized for the screen they land on, which is what keeps photo-heavy pages quick on a phone.

Integrations and automation

• Enquiry form to inbox — course enquiries are stored in the WordPress admin and emailed straight through, so nothing depends on remembering to log in and check.
• Course-specific enquiries — the “enquire about this course” link on every course carries the course name into the form, so Karen knows what the enquiry is about before she reads it.
• Google Reviews pulled in and cached on the server rather than fetched by the visitor’s browser, so the reviews section costs nothing in page speed.
• Google Search Console verified against Karen’s own Google account, so the data is hers.
• Cookie consent configured for what the site actually uses, rather than a generic banner asking permission for things that are not there.

The result

Launched, handed over, and Karen owns the site, the domain and the content. Most of her customers find her on a phone, so mobile is the score that matters.

Search Console was only verified at launch, so there are no traffic or ranking figures yet. I’ll add those here when there are some.

More work

• Treemasters Arboricultural & Forestry — a trade site built to get the phone ringing
• SR7 Transport — a live quote tool and a job management system, built for my own business
• Fishing Lives — a members and moderation platform, built and run by SR7
• Back to all work

Want the same for your business?

If you run a training business, a trade or any small firm with a site that’s overdue, tell me what you do and I’ll come back with a straight answer and a fixed price. Get a quote or call 07538 227194.