Built by Corey / Proposal for Bicks of Montpellier
Current site  ↗ Open live preview  ↗
★ Proposal · prepared for Bicks of Montpellier · 25 May 2026

A few specific fixes for bicksofmontpellier.co.uk

Bicks of Montpellier · Cheltenham · website rebuild. I rebuild small-business sites in my spare time when I can see they are leaving conversions on the table. Three things stood out on the live site in ten minutes. Three findings below, then a working rebuild you can click through.

Open live preview  ↗ Read the three findings Reply to the proposal
Address · 5 Montpellier Walk, Cheltenham GL50 1SD Trading since · 1895 Owners · Stuart and Sonja Bradley
The workshop bench at Bicks of Montpellier, 5 Montpellier Walk, Cheltenham, where Stuart and Sonja Bradley make bespoke commissions
5 Montpellier Walk · Cheltenham · since 1895

130 years on Montpellier Walk. Pforzheim-trained bench. Bespoke designed and made on the premises. Open the live preview  ↗

Three findings, ordered by revenue impact

What the current site is leaving on the table.

A walk-through of the live bicksofmontpellier.co.uk on 25 May 2026.

01

Every page on the live site is a "Pardon our dust" placeholder.

What I saw
Open bicksofmontpellier.co.uk in any browser, and the homepage, /about, /contact, /testimonials, /collections, and every one of the 120 product pages listed in your sitemap returns the same single sentence: "Pardon our dust. We are working on something amazing, check back soon." Google still indexes the sitemap, so a search for "sapphire diamond eternity ring Cheltenham" leads a real customer to a product page that shows that one message. The HTML weight of the homepage is 232 KB across 39 WordPress asset requests, all to render one paragraph of placeholder text. The "amazing" thing has been coming for months.
Cause
The site is on WordPress with the Yoast SEO plugin and a block theme. The page templates have been swapped out for a maintenance message, but the sitemap, the meta tags, and the JSON-LD organisation block all still claim the site is live. Search engines and customers see the same URLs you indexed in 2024; only the body has gone dark. The fix is not "wait for the something amazing"; it is rebuild from scratch on a static stack that does not have a maintenance mode at all, because every page is just a file.
After rebuild
After rebuild: every page renders real content, statically, at sub-100 ms first byte. The 130-year heritage anchored to 5 Montpellier Walk, the Stuart-and-Sonja Bradley ownership and Pforzheim-trained bench, the bespoke commission journey (CAD mock-up through to finished ring), the antique-alongside-contemporary buying philosophy, the Tue-Sat 10-5 hours, all of it live and indexable. The 120 product slugs from the existing sitemap each become a clean static page with the real product photo (already on your server at full resolution), the carat weight, the metal spec, the stone provenance. No maintenance mode, because nothing to maintain.
02

The homepage image is an AI-generated ChatGPT placeholder.

What I saw
The Open Graph image on bicksofmontpellier.co.uk is a 766x800 PNG at /wp-content/uploads/2026/02/ChatGPT-Image-Feb-16-2026-02_13_29-PM-e1771251718172.png. The filename is unedited from the export dialog; it tells anyone who looks the picture was generated, not photographed. When the URL is shared in WhatsApp, iMessage, Slack, LinkedIn, or any social platform, the unfurl card pulls that AI-generated PNG as the preview. A 130-year independent jeweller on Montpellier Walk, where the entire street is famous for its Regency Caryatid statues, is representing itself online with a synthetic image. The real shopfront and a thousand real product photographs sit on your own server, unused as the hero.
Cause
A WordPress theme placeholder needed a header image, and a generated one was dropped in as a short-term solution. The og:image meta tag in the page head was never pointed at any of the real product photos already uploaded to /wp-content/uploads/. The Yoast plugin’s schema block declares the same generated PNG as the page’s primaryImageOfPage.
After rebuild
After rebuild: the hero uses a real photograph of the bench or the shopfront. The og:image meta is hosted as an absolute URL on the rebuild’s domain, sized at 1200x630 for clean unfurls on WhatsApp and iMessage. The 120 real product photos already in /wp-content/uploads/ get migrated and re-served from the new stack, with sensible filenames the rest of the metadata can reference. The first thing a forwarded link shows is the workshop and the shopfront, not a synthetic image with the timestamp in its filename.
03

A 130-year history with a Mandela-Pen credit, none of it on the site.

What I saw
Bicks of Montpellier has traded at 5 Montpellier Walk since 1895. Stuart Bradley, the current owner and master goldsmith, ran the largest jewellery manufacturer in the southern hemisphere for over twenty years before taking on the Bicks shop. Among his manufacturing credits: the 18ct yellow-gold pen used by Nelson Mandela to sign South Africa’s new constitution, and the sterling-silver elephants presented by the South African government to the Three Tenors. Bicks’ craftspeople are trained by master goldsmiths in Pforzheim, the German "gold city". None of this appears on the live site. The customer choosing between Bicks and the Promenade chain jewellers, half a mile away, has no way to know which side of that choice the bench, the heritage, and the manufacturing pedigree actually sit.
Cause
WordPress, with the placeholder swap, removed every editorial template the about/our-team/heritage pages would have used. The shopfront wordmark "BICKS OF MONTPELLIER" is the only public claim of trade left. The press credentials live in trade-directory listings (Eros, SoGlos, Visit Cheltenham) and on Stuart’s LinkedIn; a sequence of clicks the engagement-ring customer is never going to make.
After rebuild
After rebuild: a dedicated heritage block on the homepage. Left column carries the editorial copy: "1895. A jeweller opens on Montpellier Walk. 130 years on, the shop is still there. Bench run today by Stuart and Sonja Bradley." Right column carries a typographic timeline anchoring the Pforzheim training, the South African manufacturing credits, and the Bicks shopfront date. A pull quote treats the Mandela-Pen credit as the historical fact it is, not as a brag. The 130-year line moves from "implied by the title tag" to the second-strongest moment on the page after the hero.
Pricing

Fixed price, no hourly billing, no surprise upgrade tier.

£2,000
Fixed for the rebuild. One-off.
£150
Per month for hosting and ongoing care, including a monthly refresh of new commissions or new antique pieces.
£50
Optional. Embedded chatbot trained on the questions Sonja answers at the counter (CAD mock-ups, remodelling inherited stones, sizing, ethical sourcing, lead times).

No retainer. No contract. No in-person visits, fully remote from Switzerland.

Next step

If the proposal lands, reply with two or three twenty-minute slots in the next ten days for a video call.

I take on three Cotswold builds this quarter, and first confirmed wins the slot. If I do not hear back by 4 June 2026, the proposal site comes down.

See the live rebuild  ↗
A working preview you can click through.
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