Portfolio / Case Study
Case Study · Web Design & Development · Lagos, Nigeria
How we audited the Halal Certification Authority's website, found a credibility gap at the heart of their digital presence, and rebuilt the entire site in a day — with live certificate verification as the centrepiece.
The organisation
The Halal Certification Authority is one of Nigeria's leading halal certification bodies. Their certificates appear on products from some of the country's most recognisable food brands.
With 80+ certified companies and 300+ certified products, HCA is a gatekeeper to a global halal market worth an estimated $7 trillion.
Their website didn't say any of that. It whispered it, between broken links.
The challenge — what the audit surfaced
We ran a full audit of HCA's live website before writing a single line of code. What we found is common across Nigerian institutional websites — a WordPress installation assembled from page-builder plugins, growing by accretion rather than design.
HCA's own blog warns consumers about unverifiable halal claims — yet the site offered no way to verify HCA's own certificates. The certified products table was a static page where every visible certificate showed as expired, with duplicated rows.
"Trainings" and "Blog" linked to nothing (#). Social links were broken. Slider images were literal dummy.png placeholders.
Getting certified meant downloading a PDF, printing it, and posting or emailing it back. For a body courting multinational food manufacturers, that's friction the competition doesn't have.
Services, process, team, partners, and blog content all competed on one endless page.
No meta descriptions, no structured titles, typos in customer-facing copy ("Spagethi", "Industried").
HCA's product is trust. Every weakness on the site — the unverifiable claims, the stale registry, the broken links — quietly undermined the one thing a certification body sells. The redesign couldn't just be prettier. It had to make trust demonstrable.
The strategy
One idea organised every decision:
"An authority you can verify."
Instead of treating the certified products list as a buried table, we made verification the site's signature feature — the first interactive element a visitor meets, and the strongest answer to HCA's own warnings about fake halal claims.
A live certificate-check widget sits in the homepage hero. Visitors don't read about trust — they test it, within seconds of arriving.
A colour system built on HCA's deep green and gold, Trajan-style display typography, and an eight-pointed star (rub el hizb) motif used as the brand mark, background pattern, and list bullets — Islamic geometric identity, executed with restraint.
The solution
A full rebuild — Home, About, Certification, Verify Registry, Training, Contact — hand-coded with no frameworks, no plugins, and no page builders. Everything the old site bolted on with WordPress plugins now ships in three static files.
The homepage hero carries a verification widget: type a certificate number, brand, or product name and check its status instantly. The full Verify Registry page offers search plus category and status filters across the certified products database.
The PDF-and-post process is replaced by a structured online application form capturing company details, industry sector, and products to certify — with the PDF retained as a secondary option.
The homepage now does one job: establish authority and route visitors. Certification gets its own page with the five-step process, audit-day breakdown, refusal and renewal policy.
The Contact page includes a dedicated "Report a suspicious halal claim" route — turning HCA's editorial stance on fake halal claims into an operational feature, and reinforcing its position as the authority.
05 / FOUNDATIONS
The build was QA-tested with automated browser testing (Playwright / Chromium): full-page rendering verification across all six pages, functional testing of the registry search and filters (32 records, live filtering), the hero verification widget, and mobile navigation — with zero JavaScript errors.
We didn't redesign the table of certified products. We made it impossible for that table to ever show stale data again.Nexum-sol — design rationale
Outcomes
This is a redesign concept, so we won't show you traffic graphs that don't exist. What we can show is the audit ledger: each problem we found, and the state it ships in now.
No way to verify certificates
Live verification widget + searchable registry with computed status
Registry showed all certificates expired
Status calculated from dates — can't go stale
Application by PDF + post/email
Online application form (PDF retained as option)
Dead "Trainings" and "Blog" nav links
Training is a full page with programmes + registration
Single overloaded homepage
Six focused pages with clear user journeys
No SEO metadata
Unique titles + descriptions on every page
Typos, dummy images, broken socials
All copy rewritten; custom SVG identity, no stock assets
Plugin-heavy WordPress stack
Three-file static site — fast, secure, hostable anywhere
This is a self-initiated audit and redesign concept built as a demonstration — not commissioned client work. The concept site ships with clearly labelled demonstration data. We do the work before we ask for the job.
The road ahead
Supabase-backed registry with QR codes on product labels linking each item straight to its registry entry.
Document upload, status tracking, and online payment via Paystack.
At 90/60/30 days before expiry — permanently solving the expired-certificate problem the audit uncovered.
Deployment, analytics, and ongoing SEO.
Services demonstrated in this project
We start every engagement the same way we started this one — with a free, honest audit of what your site says about you. If you like what we find, we'll show you what we'd build.