VicWide Inspection Services

The ideology

Explain before you sell: every page says what a service is, what it is not and what happens next, in plain language.

• Plain words, no promises

  Copy never promises an approval, a certification or a financial outcome, and independent inspections are always kept separate from the statutory inspections a building surveyor carries out under a permit.

• Honest imagery

  The films, stills and 3D views are illustrations centred on one reference house, and each is labelled as an illustration, never as an actual property or real inspection work.

• One house, many services

  Structure, timber, pool and gate, fence, land and documents each map to a part of the same home, so a visitor can find a service by pointing at the part of the property they are worried about.

• The flourish is optional

  The 3D model and film sit on top of a complete site. Every service stays reachable without WebGL, without motion and with a keyboard or screen reader.

• A phone should feel like an app

  Below tablet width the site becomes an app shell: a floating title bar with a back chevron, a bottom tab bar for Home, Services, Book, Ask and Menu, and sheets instead of pop-ups.

• Next.js 16 (App Router)Renders every page on the server so it reads well for search engines, refreshes service and suburb pages hourly, and releases each guide on its publish date without a redeploy (x-nextjs headers on the live site).
• React 19 and TypeScriptThe component layer and type safety for the whole site.
• Tailwind CSS 4Holds the colour, type and spacing tokens (bone, ink, bronze, stone) so every page uses the same palette.
• three.js, React Three Fiber and dreiRun the 3D explore chapter, where visitors turn the illustrated property and tap an area to see its services.
• gltf-transform, meshoptimizer and DracoCompress the 3D property model (432 KB main model plus a lighter level of detail) so it loads fast.
• @react-three/postprocessingAdds light finishing effects to the 3D stage on capable devices.
• LenisSmooth scrolling on the home page, loaded lazily.
• MotionDrives the hero film's scroll scrub and hand-over, the Ask VicWide assistant panel and tab transitions.
• ZustandShares state such as the selected area and the enquiry draft between the 3D view, menus and forms.
• React Hook Form and ZodValidate the booking, quote, general and training enquiry forms with the same rules on the browser and the server.
• MDX and gray-matterService pages are written as MDX files and guides as Markdown with a publish date, so content lives in the repository without a CMS.
• Anthropic SDKPowers the Ask VicWide assistant, which answers only from an approved answers file and falls back to a local engine without an API key.
• NodemailerEmails each enquiry with its unique reference to VicWide.
• HiggsfieldGenerated the illustrative stills and short films, centred on one reference house (manifest and ingest script in the repo).
• sharp and ffmpegResize and encode the stills and films into web formats and sizes.
• Service worker and web manifestMake the site installable on phones and give it an offline page and faster repeat visits.
• Vitest, Playwright and axe-coreUnit tests, end-to-end browser checks and accessibility checks.
• Hostinger Node.js hosting behind CloudflareServes the live site (platform: hostinger and server: cloudflare headers).

• Explore the property in 3D

  A 3D model of the illustrated house with seven areas (structure, timber, pool and gate, fence, land, documents, whole property). Turn it, tap an area and the related services appear, with a text list of the same areas for anyone not using 3D. Phones get a full-screen viewer on demand.

• A hero you can read on the first frame

  The opening film of the house carries stage chips for blueprint, massing, materials and finished, a pause control, and the headline and booking buttons visible straight away.

• 22 services, six groups, one clear template

  Each service page explains who it is for, what it covers, what you receive and how to prepare, with booking or quote buttons that already carry the service. Inspection pages such as pre-purchase, structural and strata add an 'Independent, not statutory' note.

• Suburb pages with real local context

  14 suburb pages name the postcode and council and describe the kind of work common there, such as new estates and handovers around Werribee, with the services people ask for most.

• Ask VicWide and WhatsApp hand-off

  An AI assistant that says plainly it is an AI and answers only from approved content, plus enquiry forms whose confirmation carries a reference and a one-tap option to send the same details to VicWide on WhatsApp.

• A guides library that grows on schedule

  Plain-language guides by category and topic, newest first, each naming the service it relates to, with an Atom feed and new articles going live on their own dates.