Overview
Starfish Search
Five people in 2018.
Forty-five today.
Since 2018
We built the Starfish brand and their first website before they had a name in the market. Several reskins later we are rebuilding the whole thing from the ground up, including the platform underneath it.
Sector
Executive search
Relationship
2018 to present
Scope
Branding, web, bespoke platform
Built on
WordPress, moving to bespoke
The brief
Reskins stopped
being enough.
For the last three or four years the pattern was a reskin every eighteen months to two years. It kept the site looking current and it papered over the cracks. What a reskin cannot do is change what the thing underneath is capable of.
The business had outgrown it. Forty-five people now, and fifteen to twenty of them in the back end regularly, running jobs and working with candidate data. WordPress was doing a job it was never designed to do.
Outgoing website
The work
Not a redesign.
A repositioning.
How Starfish want to be positioned is their call, and the content comes from them. Our job is to interpret it and build the site and the assets around it, with enough room to carry them for the next three years without another reskin papering over anything.
We also used to produce their client packs, proposals and adverts every month. We stepped back from that at the end of 2025 to concentrate on the web side, and this rebuild is where that attention went.
Candidate packs
The detail
Fifteen to twenty people
in the back end.
Job administration, candidate applications, and the equal opportunities data that comes in with them. Right now reporting on any of that means exporting it and rebuilding it in Excel. The new platform produces the right visuals from the outset, so nobody is reformatting a spreadsheet to answer a question the system already knows the answer to.
A fully bespoke platform replacing WordPress, built around how the team actually works rather than around what a general purpose CMS will allow. We are ready from the end of October. Starfish decide when it goes live, which will be before the end of 2026.
Platform · job admin
Platform · reporting
New brand
