Books & Ink Bookshop · Winchcombe · website rebuild
I rebuild small-business websites in my spare time when I can see the site is selling the business short. I spent some time on the Books & Ink site after a walk through Winchcombe, and three things stood out, all before I had seen a single book. Below are the three findings, then a working rebuild of the shop you can click through and judge for yourself.
What I saw
The live shop runs on booksandinkbookshop.com, but several of its pages, including About and Contact, redirect automated and preview requests to a /blocked page rather than serving the page. The second domain, booksandink.co.uk, the one that matches your email address, mirrors the shop but its TLS security certificate expired on 17 January 2026. A visitor typing that address today gets a full-page browser warning ("your connection is not private") instead of the shop. So depending on which link a customer follows, they can hit a block page or a security warning before they ever see a book.
What the rebuild does
The rebuild lives on one canonical domain over a valid, auto-renewing certificate, with the other domain redirected to it, so every link lands on the shop, every time, with no warnings and no block page.
What I saw
A look at the homepage source finds only a bare WebSite tag in the structured data, with no address, no opening hours, no telephone and no geographic location. There is no BookStore or LocalBusiness markup at all, and no Open Graph image, so a shared link unfurls blank in messages. Google has no reliable way to tell a searcher that this is a second-hand and antiquarian bookshop at 6 North Street, Winchcombe, open Thursday to Sunday, holding 25,000 titles. The page title is just "Books and Ink Bookshop" and the description reads "Books and Ink Bookshop home page".
What the rebuild does
The rebuild ships BookStore plus LocalBusiness and FAQ structured data, the full North Street address, the real opening pattern, and a Google Maps embed, plus a proper title, description and share image, so the shop surfaces on the Winchcombe and Cotswold searches it should already own.
What I saw
The site runs on a stock antiquarian-bookseller template (ChrisLands) on an old jQuery build, the same shell hundreds of dealers share, so nothing about it looks like Winchcombe or like you. The homepage carries promotional tiles and tiny product thumbnails, but there is no real photograph of the North Street shopfront, the two-floor interior or the Cotswold setting, and nothing about Sam, the 25,000 titles, the prints and maps, or The Book Nook above the shop. The thing that makes Books & Ink worth the trip up North Street is invisible online.
What the rebuild does
The rebuild is a typography-led site built for this shop alone, in an iron-gall ink, antiquarian-oxblood and aged-vellum palette drawn from your own interior, leading with the shop, the stock, the local setting and The Book Nook, so the character shows before a word is read.
No retainer. No contract. No in-person visits, fully remote from Switzerland.
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 Cotswold and border builds this quarter, and first confirmed wins the slot. If I do not hear back by 11 June, the proposal site comes down.
Corey Musa · Cardiff software developer based in Switzerland · +44 7884 442 651 · corey@builtbycorey.com