Ludlow Bookbinders · Ludford, Ludlow · website rebuild
I rebuild small-business websites in my spare time when I can see the site is selling the work short. I spent ten minutes on ludlowbookbinders.co.uk after reading that you bound three British Book Design and Production Books of the Year, and three things stood out, all on the live site. Below are the three findings, then a working rebuild of the bindery you can click through and judge for yourself.
What I saw
Ludlow Bookbinders bound Havana (Book of the Year 2017), Beowulf (Book of the Year 2023) and Out in the Cold (Book of the Year and Best British Book 2024) at the British Book Design and Production Awards. The current site at ludlowbookbinders.co.uk is a classic .asp build that still loads jQuery 1.11.3, html5shiv and respond.js, the polyfills sites shipped to support Internet Explorer 8. There is no responsive layout, so on a phone the pages do not reflow and the gilt work that photographs beautifully is shown small.
What the rebuild does
The rebuild is one typography-led page built for this bindery alone, in an oxblood, gilt and vellum palette drawn from your own coronation-bible work, so the craft reads in the first second and the photographs run full width.
What I saw
The address on the contact page is wrapped in a Cloudflare email-protection cipher, so it is not selectable, not machine-readable, and a phone or screen reader cannot lift it. Enquiries route through a legacy .asp form. For a workshop that takes commissions from collectors and presses well beyond Ludlow, the simplest path to a new commission is harder than it should be.
What the rebuild does
The rebuild puts a plain mailto and the 01584 number in reach on every screen, with a short commission enquiry form that names the work (a single fine binding, a rebind, a Solander box) the way you actually take it in.
What I saw
The page source carries no LocalBusiness or Organization JSON-LD, no trade markup and no address in the markup, only in body text. Google has little to work with when someone searches for fine binding, book restoration or a presentation box in Ludlow, Shropshire or the wider Marches. The Ludford workshop is effectively invisible to that local intent.
What the rebuild does
The rebuild ships LocalBusiness and FAQ structured data, the full Unit 5 Ludford postal address, the E.164 phone and a real Google Maps embed, so the workshop surfaces on the 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 Marches 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