A few specific fixes for botham.co.uk

A few specific fixes for botham.co.uk.

Botham's of Whitby · Whitby · website rebuild

I rebuild small-business sites in my spare time when I can see they are leaving conversions on the table. I spent ten minutes on botham.co.uk on the morning of 19 May and three things stood out, all visible on the homepage. What follows is the three findings, what the rebuild does about each, the price, and a link to a working preview you can click through.

No. 01 The 160-year founding story and Elizabeth Botham herself sit four clicks below the homepage shop grid.

What I saw. Looked at botham.co.uk on the morning of 19 May. The homepage opens with the Shopwired product carousel and the "as seen on BBC Countryfile" cutout. Elizabeth Botham (1865) and the great-grandchildren currently running the business (Jo Botham as Managing Director, Nick Botham as Chairman, Sarah Jarman and Liz Roberts as Directors, with Kay Dickinson, Anita Marshall and Lois Borrett on the board as great-great-granddaughters) only appear on /about-us, which is three clicks from the homepage. A first-time visitor scrolling on a phone never learns the bakery is 160 years old, never sees the founder's face, and never knows the family in charge today are her direct descendants.

What the rebuild does. The rebuild puts the heritage front and centre. The hero names 1865, names Elizabeth Botham, and lays out the five generations on the badge strip. A heritage block centres Elizabeth's portrait (the archival photograph already in your CMS) and walks the visitor from the basket-in-the-market to the great-grandchildren on today's board.

No. 02 Zero LocalBusiness, Bakery, or FAQPage JSON-LD, so Google and Apple Maps see a generic Shopwired storefront.

What I saw. grep -c "application/ld+json" on the served homepage HTML returns 0. There is no LocalBusiness or Bakery schema, no PostalAddress for any of the five Whitby venues, no openingHoursSpecification, no AggregateRating despite strong Google review profiles on the Skinner Street, Baxtergate and Pickering listings, and no FAQPage despite the same customer questions recurring on the live site. Google Search, the Knowledge Graph and Apple Maps cannot see the 1865 founding date, the Skinner Street original, or the five Whitby venues as structured data.

What the rebuild does. The rebuild emits one inline application/ld+json block at build time with @type ["LocalBusiness","Bakery"], the SR1 1TX-equivalent YO21 3AH PostalAddress for Skinner Street, telephone in E.164, openingHoursSpecification for Mon-Sat, founder Elizabeth Botham, foundingDate 1865, a list of related sub-locations for the other four venues, and a FAQPage block on the most-asked customer questions.

No. 03 The og:image, og:title and meta description are missing on the homepage, so every link share unfurls blank.

What I saw. Pasted https://www.botham.co.uk/ into Slack, WhatsApp and an iMessage thread on my phone. All three rendered as a blank Shopwired-default unfurl: no Whitby Lemon Bun photo, no business name in the title, no description line. The Shopwired theme has not been given an og:image meta tag, an og:title, an og:description, or a meta name="description". A 160-year-old bakery whose lemon buns are nationally recognisable gets the same blank card every templated site does.

What the rebuild does. The rebuilt /preview/ sets og:image to an absolute 1200x630 hosted JPG of the iced Whitby Lemon Buns, og:title to "Botham's of Whitby, since 1865", og:description to a one-line about-us, and twitter:card to summary_large_image. WhatsApp, iMessage, Slack, Google Images and Apple Maps preview cards then surface a stack of iced lemon buns against the cream, with "Whitby family bakery since 1865" as the title.

One fixed price. No retainer.

£2,000Fixed for the rebuild, one-off.

£150Per month for hosting and ongoing care.

£50Optional. Embedded chatbot trained on your FAQs.

No retainer. No contract. No in-person visits, fully remote from Switzerland.

One round of revisions before launch

DNS cutover handled (you keep the domain in your name)

30 days of post-launch tweaks at no extra cost

Source code handed over on day 60 (you own everything)

Worth answering up front.

What happens to the existing Shopwired storefront, the product catalogue and the customer accounts?

The marketing site moves to Astro on Vercel. The Shopwired storefront either stays on a sub-domain (shop.botham.co.uk) for the cake and tin-of-biscuits transactions, or the rebuilt marketing site links straight into the existing Shopwired product pages from a single CTA. Customer accounts, order history, and the existing wholesale customer relationships are not touched. Decision depends on how active the Shopwired side is on a typical week, happy to look at the admin once and recommend.

Do I have to commit to a particular design or sign off before any work starts?

No. The /preview link in this proposal is a working sketch, not the final design. If you reply, the first call is a 20-minute video covering what you like, what you do not, and any constraints (the Skinner Street Upstairs restoration, the wholesale side, photography rights). I take that back, do a second pass with your feedback baked in, and only then do we agree the direction. You are not signing off on the rebuild you can see today.

I do not really have a "brand book" or finished brand assets, will that be a problem?

No. Most family businesses in this register do not have a brand book, and the ones that do usually had it made by someone who was not the family. The rebuild samples its palette directly from your real assets: the Resolution Tea tin, the cream of the iced lemon-bun glaze, the Spode-blue of the scroll-banner logo, the jam-red of the Shah Ginger Biscuit tin. If you have higher-resolution photography of Skinner Street, the bakery, or the family I will use it. If not I will work from what is publicly available.

How long does this take and what do you need from me?

Three weeks end-to-end. Week one: typography-led homepage with the 1865 founding story, the great-grandchildren on the board, and real photography. Week two: per-section blocks (the iconic products, the five venues, the wholesale side, the Resolution Blend story), JSON-LD schema, og:image generation, FAQ. Week three: contact form wiring, DNS cutover, Shopwired backend kept where it is. From you: an hour on a video call at kickoff, photos you are happy to use, a short read-through at the end of weeks one and two.

If the proposal lands.

If the proposal lands, reply with two or three 20-minute slots in the next ten days for a video call. I take on three Yorkshire builds this quarter, and first confirmed wins the slot. If I do not hear back by 29 May, the proposal site comes down.

See the live rebuild

A working preview you can click through.

Opens in this tab. Photos, palette, schema, the lot.

Open /preview/ ↗