Built by Corey See the live rebuild ↗
Proposal · prepared for Chequers Antiques · 29 May 2026

A few specific fixes for chequersantiques.co.uk

Chequers Antiques · Petworth · website rebuild

I rebuild small-business sites in my own time when I can see they are leaving something on the table. I spent ten minutes on chequersantiques.co.uk and three things stood out, all on the parts of the site that should be doing the most for a shop with this much good stock in a town people travel to for antiques. Three findings below, then a working rebuild you can click through.

Open live preview  ↗ Read the three findings Reply to the proposal
The Playhouse Gallery · Lombard Street · Petworth

The independent antiques shop in the heart of Petworth, run by Paul Hawtrey since 2009. Open the live preview ↗

Three findings, from ten minutes on the live site

What the shop already owns, that the site is not showing.

A walk-through of the live chequersantiques.co.uk on 29 May 2026. None of these is a redesign for its own sake, each is something the shop has that the site is keeping to itself.

01

The footer still reads copyright 2023, and the site carries no Store or LocalBusiness structured data, so Google cannot read the Lombard Street address, the hours or the 2009 founding as facts.

What I saw
The footer on chequersantiques.co.uk still says copyright 2023. A crawl of the page finds no Store, LocalBusiness or PostalAddress in the structured data, no openingHours for Monday to Saturday 10:30 to 5, no foundingDate of 2009, and no FAQPage. For a shop whose customers search for an antiques dealer in Petworth, the facts that would put it on the map are present in the page text but invisible to a machine reading the markup.
In the rebuild
The rebuild ships a Store plus LocalBusiness graph with the full Playhouse Gallery address, the telephone in E.164 form, the Monday to Saturday hours and the 2009 founding, plus a FAQPage built from the questions a buyer actually asks at the counter. The copyright year reads the current year, set once.
02

The homepage opens on a generic template banner, with no sense that this is a destination shop in Petworth's antiques quarter run by Paul Hawtrey since 2009.

What I saw
The landing screen is a stock template carousel. A first-time visitor cannot tell that Chequers sits on cobbled Lombard Street in the heart of Petworth, the one town outside London with over thirty antiques dealers in a square mile, that Paul Hawtrey has run it since March 2009, or that fresh stock arrives every week. The thing that separates Chequers from a listings page, the shop itself and where it stands, never reaches the first screen.
In the rebuild
The rebuild leads with the real Lombard Street shopfront, names Paul Hawtrey and the 2009 opening, places the shop inside Petworth’s antiques quarter near Petworth House, and gives the categories a proper taxonomy with a "new this week" note.
03

The object photography that is the whole appeal of an antiques shop is shrunk into a template grid, with no room for the hallmark, the maker or the period a collector buys on.

What I saw
The stock is genuinely good, a bracket clock with a silvered dial signed Moore and Sons of Clerkenwell, a Baroque cast silver taperstick, a rosewood bonheur du jour. On the live site each sits as a small square in a template grid, the same size as everything else, with an artist or a title and a price but no room for the assay marks, the dial signature or the period note. The detail that turns a browser into a buyer is missing from the page.
In the rebuild
The rebuild gives each piece room to breathe, a larger plate, a caption with the period, the timber or the hallmark, and a one-line note in the dealer’s own voice, so the listings read the way Paul talks about the pieces in the shop.
Where the site is today

The current build, and what the rebuild changes.

Current ↗ chequersantiques.co.uk
Platform
WordPress + WooCommerce, generic theme
Schema
None. No Store, no LocalBusiness, no address, no hours, no 2009.
Footer
Copyright reads 2023.
Hero
Template banner carousel. No shopfront, no Petworth, no heritage.
Listings
Title + price in a fixed grid. No hallmark, maker or period note.
Proposed
Framework
Astro static front (Astro 6), fast on mobile
Schema
Store + LocalBusiness + PostalAddress + hours + foundingDate + FAQPage
Footer
Current year, set once in code
Hero
Real Lombard Street shopfront, Paul Hawtrey, Petworth quarter, since 2009
Listings
Larger plates with period, timber and hallmark captions in the dealer voice
Pricing

One fixed price. No retainer, no contract.

The build rebuilds the front of the shop, the home page and the way the stock is shown. Everything below is the whole cost.

£2,000
Fixed for the rebuild. One-off.
£150
Per month for hosting and ongoing care.
£50
Optional. Embedded chatbot trained on FAQs.

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

  • •  One round of revisions before launch
  • •  DNS cutover handled, you keep the domain in your name
  • •  30 days of post-launch tweaks at no extra cost
  • •  Source code handed over on day 60, you own everything
The close

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 of this kind this quarter, and first confirmed wins the slot. If I do not hear back by 8 June, the proposal site comes down.

See the live rebuild A working preview you can click through · opens in a new tab ↗