Chepstow Books & Gifts · Chepstow · website rebuild
I rebuild small-business websites in my spare time when I can see the site is selling the business short. I spent ten minutes on chepstowbooks.co.uk after reading that you were named a British Book Awards 2026 finalist, and three things stood out, all on the homepage. Below are the three findings, then a working rebuild of the shop you can click through and judge for yourself.
What I saw
In March 2026 Chepstow Books & Gifts was named a regional finalist for Independent Bookshop of the Year at the British Book Awards, one of 76 shops chosen across the UK and Ireland. The homepage at chepstowbooks.co.uk opens instead on a featured product and a ten-item "Top Picks" grid. A first-time visitor arriving from a Google search sees a stock list, not an award-shortlisted shop that drew Michael Palin and Ruth Jones to a Welsh-border market town in 2025.
What the rebuild does
The rebuild leads with the finalist credential and the events programme, the two things that actually set the shop apart, then lets the stock follow underneath.
What I saw
The current storefront runs Shopify's free Debut theme, the default a shop is given before it is designed, with template assets internally dated to 2020. The result is the generic visual hierarchy thousands of small Shopify stores share. Twenty-five years of trading on St Mary Street, roughly eighty author events a year, and a place on a national shortlist all read, in the first second, as a stock store.
What the rebuild does
The rebuild is a typography-led site built for this shop alone, in a foxed-cream, oak and Wye-navy palette drawn from the shop's own logo and interior, so the credibility shows before a word is read.
What I saw
A look at the source finds no BookStore or LocalBusiness JSON-LD, no opening-hours markup, and the St Mary Street address in body text only. Google cannot reliably tell a searcher that this is an award-shortlisted Chepstow bookshop, open Mon to Sat 10 to 4, that runs an author-events programme. The page title still reads "www.chepstowbooks.co.uk" rather than anything a person would search for.
What the rebuild does
The rebuild ships BookStore plus LocalBusiness and FAQ structured data, opening hours, the full postal address and a real Google Maps embed, so the shop surfaces on the Chepstow and Wye-valley searches it should already own.
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 Welsh and border builds this quarter, and first confirmed wins the slot. If I do not hear back by 8 June, the proposal site comes down.
Corey Musa · Cardiff software developer based in Switzerland · +44 7884 442 651 · corey@builtbycorey.com