The Situation
V&D Executive Protection is a licensed Florida security company in Miami: executive protection, armed and unarmed officers, estate and high-rise security, chauffeured transportation, event security and private investigations. The team is built around career operators, and the work is won on credibility.
The old site did not carry that. It was a Wix template with generic imagery, no Spanish edition in a market where a large share of clients search in Spanish, one contact form and no structured data. For a category where buyers check licensing, credentials and response time before they call, the website was the weakest part of the sales process.
The Decisions
1. Build the Spanish edition as a real site, not a translation widget
Every English page has a Spanish counterpart at its own URL, linked with hreflang: 13 pages in English, 13 in Spanish. Translation plugins and browser translation produce pages Google treats as duplicates and readers treat as awkward. A separate edition can be written properly, indexed properly and measured separately.
2. One page per service, not a services list
Nine services became nine pages, each with its own hero, its own copy and its own Service
and LocalBusiness schema. Someone searching for estate security in Miami and someone searching
for chauffeured transportation are two different customers; a single "Services" page serves neither well.
3. Their own photography, framed for the real page
Stock images of men in suits are the default in this industry and they read as stock. The client sent real photos and video of the team, the fleet and actual details, and we built the heroes around them. Framing was measured in the real page box rather than guessed, because a vertical phone video in a wide hero crops to a narrow band and cuts heads off. That work is invisible when it is right.
4. Three forms for three different intents
A quote request, an employment application and a transportation booking with its own fields. They are different conversations, and sending all three through one contact form loses information the company needs before it can answer.
5. Built to be quoted by AI assistants, not only ranked
Structured data on every page (security service, services, FAQs, breadcrumbs, the team), an
llms.txt file describing the company in plain language, and a robots file that allows the AI
crawlers. Buyers increasingly ask an assistant before they search, and assistants quote sources they can
parse.
The Migration
The technically risky part was not the design. The site moved from Wix to WordPress on IONOS, which meant transferring the domain, rebuilding the DNS zone and keeping the company's email alive through the switch.
- Domain transfer from Wix to IONOS, with the authorization code handled by the client directly and never by us.
- DNS zone rebuilt and verified before the switch: A records, MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC, so mail to the company address kept working.
- SSL issued on the new host and both the root and www versions verified.
- Old redirects preserved so URLs that existed on the old site still resolve.
The lesson worth repeating: on this kind of move, email breaks more often than the website does, and it is the failure the client notices within the hour. The DNS zone gets built and checked before anything points at it.