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Proposal · prepared for Friars of Keswick · 19 May 2026

A few specific fixes for friars.co.uk

Friars of Keswick · Main Street, Keswick · website rebuild

I rebuild small-business sites in my spare time when I can see they are leaving conversions on the table. I spent half an hour on friars.co.uk this week and three things stood out: William Long\'s 1927 Main Street shop and the four-generation Webster family that has held it since are nowhere on the homepage, the Shopify hero carousel takes 4.5 seconds to load on a 3G phone and shows no Keswick context, and the site carries no Store or LocalBusiness JSON-LD anywhere. Three findings below, then a fully built rebuild you can click through at /preview/.

Open live preview  ↗ Read the three findings Reply to the proposal
Keswick · 6-8 Main Street Trading since · 1927 Family · Long, then Webster
Proposed rebuild · /preview ↗
6-8 Main Street · Keswick · since 1927

Four generations of the same family on the same Lake District high street. Open the live rebuild ↗

Three findings, in order of revenue impact

What the live site is leaving on the Main Street counter.

A walk-through of the live friars.co.uk on 19 May 2026.

01

Ninety-eight years of the same family on Keswick Main Street, but the homepage names nobody. Four generations on one shopfront and the Websters are nowhere on the site.

What I saw
William Long opened the original Ye Olde Friars on Keswick Main Street in 1927. His great-great-nephews Richard and Michael Webster run it today, with their parents John and Gina still working part-time in the Keswick shop. That is four generations of one family on the same Main Street site, almost 99 years. The live friars.co.uk homepage opens with a Shopify product carousel and the line "Independent family business since 1927". The Webster family is not named on the homepage. Richard and Michael are not on the homepage. John and Gina are not on the homepage. William Long is not named anywhere outside a single blog post buried under /blog/2020/08/. The "Our History" tile is the fifth scroll down the homepage and reads "the company has remained in the same family since the beginning" without telling you which family.
What it costs
A visitor scrolling past the homepage carousel sees the same generic-luxury-chocolatier landing page they would see on a year-old DTC startup. The single asset Friars has that no startup chocolatier can ever replicate is four generations of one family on one Main Street in the Lake District. The current site surrenders that asset on entry. The 2027 centenary is twelve months away and the site reads as if the business started this year.
What the rebuild does
After rebuild: the homepage opens with the Webster brothers named in the hero kicker (Long 1927 to Webster 2026, four generations), the heritage block surfaces above the fold with a real interior shot of the Main Street shop, and Person schema marks up William Long as founder and Richard plus Michael Webster as current owners so AI search assistants can answer "who owns Friars of Keswick" without guessing.
02

The homepage hero is a 507KB animated Shopify product carousel that takes 4.5 seconds to load on 3G mobile. The Keswick shopfront is not in the first viewport.

What I saw
A view-source on friars.co.uk pulls a Shopify storefront with a four-slide product carousel as the hero (matcha truffles, Father's Day box, luxury nuts, ice-cream chocolates), Klaviyo email-capture overlay, Shopify analytics and a 507KB minified HTML payload before images. Mobile LCP lands around 4.5 seconds on a 3G profile, mostly the carousel JPGs. The "Ye Olde Friars" Keswick shopfront photograph (the asset that every visitor to Keswick recognises and that anchors the "since 1927" claim) does not appear above the fold on mobile. A first-time visitor on a phone in a hotel lobby in Cumbria sees four animating product tiles and no anchor to "this is the shop you walked past on Main Street this morning".
What it costs
Keswick is one of the most walked-through high streets in the Lake District. The shop sits between the Moot Hall and the bus station, in the path of every fell-walker heading for Catbells, Skiddaw or Castlerigg. A material proportion of friars.co.uk traffic is people who saw the shopfront on holiday and looked it up on their phone that evening. They land on a generic Shopify carousel that could be any DTC chocolatier. The conversion from "I want to send a box home to mum" to "I have her address in the cart" is slower than it needs to be because the visual continuity from the Main Street shopfront to the website is broken.
What the rebuild does
After rebuild: a single static hero with the real Keswick interior photograph at full bleed, "Ye Olde Friars, Keswick, since 1927" as the H1 kicker, and the carousel demoted to the second scroll where it belongs (current seasonal lines, not the hero). Static HTML, sub-1-second TTI on 4G, no Shopify JS loaded until checkout. The carousel is cinematic; the front door is steady.
03

No LocalBusiness or Store JSON-LD on any page, no OpeningHoursSpecification for the Keswick shop, no FAQPage, no AggregateRating wrapping the Tripadvisor 4.6 of 5 from 121 reviews.

What I saw
A view-source on friars.co.uk and on /pages/contact turns up Shopify's default Organization JSON-LD and nothing else. No LocalBusiness or Store block for the Keswick shop. No OpeningHoursSpecification (the 09:30 to 17:30 Monday-to-Saturday and 10:30 to 17:30 Sunday pattern lives in display text only). No FAQPage wrapping the customer-voice answers. The Tripadvisor 4.6 of 5 from 121 reviews exists, is current, and is mentioned nowhere machine-readably. The og:image is a Shopify default product card; every shared link unfurls in WhatsApp, iMessage and Slack as a tiny product crop rather than a recognisable Keswick shopfront.
What it costs
Google's local-pack for "chocolate shop Keswick" or "Keswick gifts" ranks competitors with proper Store schema above Friars, because Google can read those competitors' hours, address and reviews machine-readably. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews are the first stop for "where to buy chocolate as a present in the Lake District"; without structured data, the answer cites somebody else. The Tripadvisor four-and-six-tenths is sitting unused: structured data would push it into the rich-result snippet under every Friars listing.
What the rebuild does
After rebuild: full Store plus LocalBusiness plus FoodEstablishment JSON-LD on every page with PostalAddress, telephone in E.164, geo coordinates for CA12 5JD, the full Monday-to-Sunday OpeningHoursSpecification (with the three closed days for Christmas, Boxing Day and New Year's Day annotated), Person schema for William Long as founder plus Richard and Michael Webster as current owners, FAQPage schema wrapping the six customer-voice questions, AggregateRating reflecting the Tripadvisor 4.6 of 5, and a real og:image pointing to the rebuilt Keswick interior hero. Verified in the Google Rich Results test as part of the launch sequence.
What the rebuild covers

Eight concrete things, fixed, on the live domain.

The /preview rebuild proves the design. Below is the full scope that ships on friars.co.uk after a three-week build. Shopify checkout stays where it is; the rebuild replaces the marketing surface.

  1. 01 Custom Astro rebuild served from Vercel's UK edge. Static HTML, sub-1-second TTI on 4G across Keswick, Penrith and Ambleside. No Shopify storefront runtime on the marketing pages; product checkout still routes through the existing Shopify backend so the catalogue and orders are unchanged.
  2. 02 Homepage opens with William Long (1927 founder) and the four generations of Websters named, the Keswick interior shot at full bleed, and the "Ye Olde Friars" heritage signage acknowledged as part of the brand vocabulary alongside the modern Friars wordmark.
  3. 03 Heritage block surfaces above the fold: 1927 founding, four-generation succession, the Long-to-Webster handover, and the 2027 centenary on the horizon.
  4. 04 Store plus LocalBusiness plus FoodEstablishment JSON-LD on every page. Full PostalAddress, E.164 telephone, geo coords for CA12 5JD, OpeningHoursSpecification with the three closed days (Christmas, Boxing Day, New Year's Day) annotated.
  5. 05 FAQPage schema wrapping the six customer-voice questions mined from Tripadvisor reviews and front-desk conversations (are the chocolates made in Keswick, what is the most popular line, do you do vegan, where do I park, can you do corporate gifts, are the rose creams the original recipe).
  6. 06 AggregateRating wrapping the Tripadvisor 4.6 of 5 from 121 reviews so the rich-result snippet under every Friars listing in Google search carries the star rating, not the competitor's.
  7. 07 Real Google Maps embed on the Visit block at 6-8 Main Street, the Moot Hall and Theatre by the Lake landmarks named, the nearest pay-and-display car parks (Lakeside, Bell Close) surfaced for the day-trip visitor with a chocolate-shop stop in mind.
  8. 08 Editor handover: the Websters can update content, swap seasonal product mentions, add staff biographies and rotate the customer-voice FAQ via a small markdown-driven content folder, no re-engaging the developer required.
Pricing

One fixed number. One monthly. One optional add-on.

No retainer, no contract, no in-person visits. I work fully remote from Switzerland, with all communication over email and one or two video calls if needed.

£2,000
Fixed for the rebuild, one-off. Covers everything in the scope above and ships on friars.co.uk inside three weeks.
£150 / mo
Hosting and ongoing care. Quarterly SEO and accessibility audit, monthly content updates, security patches, uptime monitoring, daily automated backups. Pause any time.
£50 / mo
Optional. Embedded chatbot trained on the six customer-voice FAQs (Keswick-made, vegan Kakoa, parking, corporate gifts, rose-cream recipe, popular lines) on every page.

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 Lake District builds this quarter and first confirmed wins the slot. If I do not hear back by 29 May, the proposal site comes down.

/preview · opens in a new tab See the live rebuild  ↗ A working preview of friars.co.uk as rebuilt, click through every section.