Proposal · prepared for The Topsham Bookshop · 19 May 2026

A few specific fixes for topshambookshop.co.uk

The Topsham Bookshop · Topsham, near Exeter · website rebuild

I rebuild small-business sites in my spare time when I can see they are leaving customers on the table. Ten minutes on topshambookshop.co.uk turned up three things, all rooted in the gap between a 2011 Blogger template and the shop you actually run at 27 Fore Street. Three findings below, then a working rebuild you can click through.

Open live preview ↗ Read the three findings Reply to the proposal

27 Fore Street · Topsham · building dated 1693

Three floors of books inside a 17th-century Dutch-brick townhouse. Open the live preview ↗

Three findings

What ten minutes on topshambookshop.co.uk surfaces.

topshambookshop.co.uk runs on a 2011 Blogger template over plain HTTP, with no SSL.

What I saw: The live site is a Blogger blog with a Simple template by Josh Peterson (noaesthetic.com), generator meta declared as "blogger", blog id 8498202307444286087. The Blogger widget config sets `httpsEnabled: false`, so the secure URL returns Cloudflare 525 and only the insecure `http://` version answers. Every modern browser flags the address bar as "Not Secure" the moment a customer lands. A fixed `width=1100` viewport meta and an `IE=EmulateIE7` compatibility tag complete the picture; the homepage tells phones to render the desktop layout in Internet Explorer 7 emulation mode. The footer still reads "© 2017", and the cookie-consent banner is in German because the default Blogger string was never localised.
What the rebuild does: The rebuild ships as a static Astro site on Vercel, HTTPS by default, mobile-first, with `width=device-width` and a 2026 stylesheet. The bookshop keeps its existing domain; DNS is moved over, the Blogger blog is archived, and the only visible change for a returning customer is that the address bar stops shouting "Not Secure" and the phone stops needing two fingers to zoom.

Three floors, five rooms, around thirty thousand books, and the shelf map is buried two clicks deep.

What I saw: The Floors page on the live site is the single most useful piece of content the shop has online. It maps every subject to its room: Devon topography on the ground-floor front, Shakespeare and Ordnance Survey maps on the first-floor back, philosophy and religion in the basement because there are no windows, vintage Penguins in the "special" room behind the counter that doubles as the staff kitchen. None of that surfaces on the homepage. A visitor browsing on a phone has to know to scroll the sidebar widget, find the Floors link, and then read a wall of plain text. Eighty per cent of the bookshop's differentiation is one page deep and zero per cent is on the front page.
What the rebuild does: The rebuild leads with a hand-drawn floor plan of the five rooms across three floors, each room labelled with its subject specialism. A returning customer who knows they want OS maps walks straight to the first-floor back. A new visitor sees the three-floor scale of the shop before they read a single paragraph. The Floors page becomes the hero, not a sidebar link.

The Tripadvisor entry for 27 Fore Street is still under "Joel Segal Books" with a July 2019 review at the top.

What I saw: The shop rebranded as The Topsham Bookshop in November 2011 under Lily Neal. Tripadvisor never got the memo. A search today for "Topsham bookshop reviews" surfaces the old "Joel Segal Books" listing, last reviewed July 2019, on the same address. The current site does nothing to claim or correct the listing; the shop's own footer credits no Google Business profile either, so the Joel Segal entry is what a prospective visitor sees first. Fifteen years of customer goodwill under the new name is sitting one column to the right of a stale listing in someone else's.
What the rebuild does: The rebuild ships LocalBusiness and BookStore JSON-LD with the correct name, address, phone, opening hours and Lily as the named owner. Alongside the launch the Tripadvisor and Google Business listings are claimed and renamed in the shop's name. "Topsham bookshop reviews" stops surfacing a 2019 review of the previous business and starts surfacing the actual one.

Pricing

Fixed price. No retainer.

£2,000  Fixed for the rebuild, one-off.
£150    Per month for hosting and ongoing care.
£50     Optional. Embedded chatbot trained on 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)

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 South West 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 a new tab