The short version: CEO Office Concepts is a Queensland office furniture specialist that fits out corporate, government and education spaces. Their old Joomla website was outdated and hard to change, and it didn’t reflect the size of the jobs they deliver. We rebuilt it on WordPress and WooCommerce with three goals: look professional to government and education buyers, let customers build a cart of products and send it as a quote request, and show completed fit-outs as proof they can handle large projects. The part that makes it work long term is the templates behind it. Projects and products are entered through simple forms, and the pages look finished whether the team fills in every field or only a few.
Most websites don’t fail on launch day. They fail slowly, in the months afterwards, when nobody can be bothered updating them because updating them is a pain.
That was the real problem CEO Office Concepts brought to us. The business was doing serious work. The website just wasn’t keeping up with it.
Who are CEO Office Concepts?
They supply and fit out office furniture across Queensland, for corporate offices, government departments and schools. Desks, seating, boardroom tables, storage, acoustic solutions, reception areas. The kind of jobs where one project can mean furnishing an entire floor.
Their customers aren’t impulse buyers. A facilities manager or a procurement officer is comparing suppliers, and they’re judging each one partly on how it presents itself.
Why did CEO Office Concepts move from Joomla to WordPress?
Because the old Joomla site had aged badly. The platform was outdated, and making even simple changes was difficult enough that changes mostly didn’t happen.
That’s the quiet cost of a hard-to-edit website. It’s not that it breaks. It’s that the business moves on and the site stays exactly where it was. New products don’t get added, finished projects don’t get shown, and the website slowly turns into an old brochure for a business that no longer looks like that.
What mattered most to the client?
Three things, and they came up early and often.
Looking the part for government and education buyers. Those buyers want to see a supplier that is established, organised and capable. A dated website undercuts all of that before anyone has picked up the phone.
Quotes, not checkouts. Nobody fits out a boardroom by clicking “pay now”. Customers need to pick products, put them together and ask for a price. The client wanted visitors to be able to build a cart of sorts and send it through as a quote request.
Proof of capacity. Saying you can handle large jobs is easy. Showing it is what convinces people. They needed a way to show completed fit-outs so a buyer could see the scale and quality of the work.
How do you sell furniture online without a checkout?
You turn the shop into a catalogue and the cart into a quote request. We built the site on WordPress and WooCommerce, then set it up so prices stay off the page and the usual “add to cart” becomes “add to quote”.
A customer browses the range, adds the desks, chairs and storage they want, and sends the whole list through in one request. The CEO Office Concepts team gets a clear picture of what the customer is after and follows up with pricing.
It’s the same habit people already have from online shopping, just pointed at a conversation with a supplier instead of a payment screen.
How do you show off fit-outs without the portfolio turning into a mess?
You stop treating each project as a blank page and give it a structure. This was the part of the build I cared about most.
Portfolios usually go wrong in one of two ways. Either every project page is designed by hand, so they all look a bit different and adding a new one is a chore. Or there’s a fixed template, and the moment a project is missing something (no customer quote yet, no workstation count) the page shows an awkward empty gap.
So we built a dedicated Projects section, technically a custom post type, with its own set of custom input fields: client, location, sector, project type, size, number of workstations, completion date, quick facts, an overview, a photo gallery and a customer quote.
The important bit is that those fields display conditionally. If a field is left blank, it simply doesn’t appear. If a whole section is missing, like the customer quote, the page closes up around it and still looks finished.
Think of it like a printed brochure template where any box you don’t fill in quietly disappears, instead of sitting there blank and making the whole page look unfinished.
That matters for three reasons. Every project looks consistent, which reads as professional. Nothing ever looks half done. And most importantly, it’s easy for the client to fill out. Adding a project is filling in a form, not designing a page.
Hover to scroll the full project page.
Did the product pages get the same treatment?
Yes, the same thinking applied. Some products come with pages of specifications, finishes and dimensions. Others have a name, a photo and a line of description.
The product templates are kept simple and straightforward, and they look good either way. A detailed product gets room to show its detail. A sparse product still looks deliberate rather than empty.
Hover to scroll the full product page.
We also set up a simple process for loading the supplier’s product spreadsheets straight into the site using WooCommerce’s built-in importer, so bringing in new ranges doesn’t depend on us or on paid plugins.
How did the site speak to each type of buyer?
Each sector got its own page. Corporate, government and education buyers care about different things, so instead of one generic “who we work with” section, each has a page that talks directly to what that buyer is looking for.
The education page, for example, highlights their approved supplier status under the Education Standing Offer Arrangement (QED SOA 104526), which is exactly the kind of detail a school’s procurement team looks for.
Hover to scroll the full Education page.
Around those sit About, Why Choose Us and Contact pages, so the full story of the business is there for anyone doing their homework.
What’s the result?
A website that finally matches the business behind it. It presents CEO Office Concepts as the established, capable supplier they are, it turns browsing into quote requests, and it shows real completed work to back up the claim that they can take on large jobs.
And because the templates do the heavy lifting, the team can keep it current themselves. That’s what will keep it working long after launch day.
You can see the live site at ceofficeconcepts.com.au.
If your website has turned into something you avoid updating, that’s usually the first sign it’s stopped working for you. We build WordPress websites at Kartia that are designed to be easy to keep current, not just good-looking on launch day. If you’d like to talk through yours, get in touch.
FAQ
Can WooCommerce work without showing prices?
Yes. WooCommerce can run as a catalogue, with prices hidden and the cart turned into a quote request. Customers choose products and send the list through, and the business replies with pricing. It suits suppliers whose prices depend on quantity, configuration or the size of the job.
Why move from Joomla to WordPress?
Mostly for ease of editing and long-term support. WordPress is widely used, well supported and simpler for a business to update itself. For CEO Office Concepts, the main issue with Joomla was that changes were difficult, so the site wasn’t being kept up to date. If you’re planning the same move, map your old page addresses to the new ones before launch so you keep your Google rankings through the redesign.
What is a custom post type?
It’s a dedicated content type in WordPress with its own fields and its own template, separate from pages and blog posts. For a portfolio, it means every project is entered the same way and displays the same way, so the section stays consistent as it grows.
Can the client update the portfolio themselves?
Yes, and that was a core part of the brief. Adding a project means filling in a form with the details they have. Fields left blank don’t appear on the page, so a project can go live without every detail and still look complete.
