Wantage Bookshop · Wantage · 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 wantagebookshop.co.uk after reading about the author events you run on Mill Street, 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
The site at wantagebookshop.co.uk runs on the generic GeneratePress theme, the footer still reads "Built with GeneratePress", and the social links are duplicated in the header. The events programme, which is the thing the shop is actually known for and which brought Maggie O'Farrell, Robert Harris and John Boyne to Wantage, sits in the same flat template hierarchy as everything else. From the team behind the award-winning Hungerford Bookshop, the site reads as a default install rather than a bookshop people travel to.
What the rebuild does
The rebuild is a typography-led site built for this shop alone, in a terracotta, ochre and foxed-cream palette drawn from your own shopfront sign, with the author-events programme as the centrepiece rather than a buried page.
What I saw
A look at the page source finds no BookStore, Store or LocalBusiness JSON-LD, no opening-hours markup, and the 18 Mill Street address in body text only. Google cannot reliably tell a searcher that this is an independent Wantage bookshop, open Monday to Saturday, a minute from the Market Place, that runs author events. For a shop that depends on people finding it off the square, that is the difference between being found and being scrolled past.
What the rebuild does
The rebuild ships Store plus BookStore and FAQ structured data, opening hours, the full postal address and a real Google Maps embed, so the shop surfaces on the Wantage and Vale of White Horse searches it should already own.
What I saw
The event images on the current site are loaded directly from img.evbuc.com, the Eventbrite content network, rather than from your own site. That means they are slow to load, they are outside your control, and if a listing changes or is taken down the picture on your own homepage breaks. The events are your strongest asset and they are running on someone else's plumbing.
What the rebuild does
The rebuild gives the events programme a self-hosted, fast-loading section you own outright, with a clean upcoming-events list, so nothing on your homepage depends on a third party staying online.
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 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