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Proposal · prepared for Saunders & Pughe · 19 May 2026

A few specific fixes for saundersandpughe.com

Saunders & Pughe · Corbridge, Northumberland · 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 saundersandpughe.com this week and three things stood out: the About page still ships with the WordPress theme\u2019s "Jane Blue, 1978, Lorem ipsum" filler in place of Rob and Marianne\u2019s 1994 founding story, the Designer Retailer of the Year 2022 NAJ award is crammed into one line of grey hero text, and the site carries no JewelryStore or LocalBusiness JSON-LD at all. Three findings below, then a fully built rebuild you can click through at /preview/.

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Corbridge · 32 Hill Street Partnership since · 1994 Directors · Rob + Marianne Pughe
Proposed rebuild · /preview ↗
32 Hill Street · Corbridge · since 1994

Thirty years of coloured gemstones on Hill Street. Open the live rebuild ↗

Three findings, in order of revenue impact

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

A walk-through of the live saundersandpughe.com on 19 May 2026.

01

The About page still ships with the WordPress theme's "Jane Blue / 1978 / Lorem ipsum" filler in place of Rob and Marianne Pughe's 1994 founding story.

What I saw
A view-source on saundersandpughe.com/about/ shows the page rendering "About Us, 40 Years in Jewelry, Since 1978" as its hero, followed by two paragraphs of "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit" body copy and a "Jane Blue, Founder" credit line. None of this is Saunders & Pughe. Rob and Marianne Pughe formed the partnership in 1994 and the homepage hero already states "For over 30 years our family business" plus "Rob and Marianne formed the partnership Saunders and Pughe in 1994." That story is the whole moat in independent jewellery, and it lives one click below a page of placeholder Latin.
What it costs
Customers comparing a coloured-gemstone engagement ring at Saunders & Pughe against the Goldsmiths or Beaverbrooks at the Eldon Square chain shops will land on /about/ to take the measure of the shop. They find Lorem ipsum and a stock-photo founder called Jane Blue, and the family-business signal is replaced with the signal that the website was set up cheaply and never finished. A first-time bespoke commission costs four figures; the About page is doing the opposite of what an About page is meant to do.
What the rebuild does
After rebuild: a dedicated /about page with the 1994 founding story sourced and dated, Rob and Marianne named with the Director titles they actually hold, the Designer Retailer of the Year 2022 NAJ award given proper weight, the Hill Street workshop and the goldsmithing team made visible, and the customer testimonial on the homepage (the "Marianne and Rob head a team" line) pulled forward instead of buried.
02

The Designer Retailer of the Year 2022, the Top Inspiring Independent Jewellers 2024 listing and the CMJ-shortlisted 2026 finalist are crammed into one strip of small text in the hero with no AggregateRating schema.

What I saw
The current saundersandpughe.com homepage stacks three significant trade awards into a single grey strip that reads "Shortlisted Finalist, The Company of Master Jewellers Awards (to be announced Autumn 2026). Included in Top Inspiring Independent Jewellers 2024, Retail Jeweller. Winner of National Association of Jewellers Designer Retailer of the Year 2022." They are the most credible asset on the entire site and they get one undecorated line each. There is no AggregateRating JSON-LD anywhere in the source. The customer testimonial ("There is always something different to buy. Marianne and Rob head a team of friendly and professional staff") is also not marked up as a Review.
What it costs
Designer Retailer of the Year is the single most valuable trade signal a small independent jewellery shop can hold. It puts Saunders & Pughe in the same conversation as Cred Jewellery (London) and a handful of similarly-scaled British independents. AI search assistants ranking "best independent jewellers Northumberland" or "designer retailer of the year UK" cannot read these awards machine-readably, so they cite chain retailers with full schema instead. ChatGPT and Perplexity will not surface Saunders & Pughe in a "where do I buy a coloured-gemstone engagement ring in the North East" answer the way they should.
What the rebuild does
After rebuild: a dedicated Awards block above the fold with each prize named, dated and given a paragraph of context. AggregateRating JSON-LD on the homepage, Review schema wrapping the verified Marianne-and-Rob testimonial, FAQPage schema wrapping the bespoke / engagement / remodelling / ethical-sourcing customer-voice questions, and a JewelryStore + LocalBusiness graph that ties the awards to the Hill Street address machine-readably.
03

No JewelryStore or LocalBusiness JSON-LD on the homepage, no OpeningHoursSpecification, no FAQPage, and the 32 Hill Street address only appears in the footer.

What I saw
A view-source on saundersandpughe.com turns up the WordPress and Yoast SEO output but no JewelryStore, no LocalBusiness, no Store JSON-LD anywhere on the homepage. The Monday-to-Saturday 10am-5pm opening hours, the closed-Sunday rule, the bank-holiday closure and the Christmas-to-New-Year closure all appear in display text only, never in OpeningHoursSpecification. The NE45 5AA postcode and 32 Hill Street address sit in the footer rather than in marked-up address fields. The Cloudflare-obfuscated email and the 01434 633302 telephone are unreadable to crawlers without the JavaScript that decodes them.
What it costs
Google's local pack for "jewellers Corbridge", "engagement rings Hexham", "bespoke jeweller Northumberland" cannot stitch together that this is the canonical jewellery shop at NE45 5AA. The "Saunders Pughe Limited" registered in Codsall, Staffordshire that comes up in Companies House gets confused with the Corbridge trading partnership in AI search answers. A coloured-gemstone customer searching "is there an independent jeweller open Saturday in the Tyne Valley" cannot get a machine-readable "yes" with hours, address and a one-tap phone link.
What the rebuild does
After rebuild: full JewelryStore + LocalBusiness JSON-LD with PostalAddress, telephone in E.164, geo coordinates for Hill Street, OpeningHoursSpecification with Sunday and bank holidays explicitly closed, Person schema for Rob and Marianne Pughe as Directors, FAQPage schema, and AggregateRating tied to the three trade awards. The og:image points at the real shopfront photograph so WhatsApp, iMessage, Slack and Facebook unfurls render correctly when the link gets shared.
What the rebuild covers

Nine concrete things, fixed, on the live domain.

The /preview rebuild proves the design. Below is the full scope that ships on saundersandpughe.com after a three-week build.

  1. 01 Custom Astro rebuild served from Vercel's UK edge. Static HTML, sub-1-second TTI on 4G across the Tyne Valley and the wider North East catchment. No WordPress runtime, no theme bundle, drops the multi-megabyte page-builder JS that currently sits over the WordPress core.
  2. 02 Homepage opens with Rob and Marianne Pughe named, 1994 partnership founding sourced and dated, the 32 Hill Street Corbridge shopfront photograph at hero scale, "over 30 years" surfaced as a real date range and the Designer Retailer of the Year 2022 award given proper hierarchy.
  3. 03 About page rebuilt from the ground up. The "40 Years in Jewelry since 1978" placeholder and the "Jane Blue Founder" Lorem ipsum gone. Replaced with the Rob-and-Marianne story, the Corbridge workshop, the goldsmithing team, the Designer Retailer of the Year, the Retail Jeweller listing and the CMJ shortlist.
  4. 04 Coloured-gemstone-led product surfacing: the fourteen-stone Shop By Gemstone taxonomy already on the site (Amethyst through Zircon) given the visual weight it deserves rather than being one drop-down in a menu. The Saunders & Pughe own-collection language (Orbit, Seedpod, Snowflake, Woodland, Pebble, Luna) properly surfaced.
  5. 05 JewelryStore + LocalBusiness JSON-LD with PostalAddress, E.164 telephone, geo coords for the Hill Street shop, OpeningHoursSpecification with Sunday and bank holidays explicitly closed, Person schema for Rob and Marianne Pughe.
  6. 06 FAQPage schema wrapping the customer-voice questions that drive bespoke and engagement enquiries: remodelling inherited pieces, coloured-stone engagement rings instead of diamond, bespoke commission timelines, FairTrade Gold sourcing, walk-in versus appointment.
  7. 07 Awards block with the three named trade prizes (NAJ 2022, Retail Jeweller 2024, CMJ 2026 shortlist) and an AggregateRating block tied to the schema graph. The verified Marianne-and-Rob customer testimonial pulled out of the slider and marked up as a Review.
  8. 08 Real Google Maps embed on the Visit block pinned to NE45 5AA, walking context for Corbridge Roman Town and the Tyne Valley, parking notes for Hill Street and Princes Street, opening hours marked up alongside the schema.
  9. 09 Editor handover: the Saunders & Pughe team can update content, swap collection photography, add new makers, rotate the awards strip and edit FAQ answers via a small markdown-driven content folder without re-engaging the developer.
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 saundersandpughe.com 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 shop FAQs (bespoke commission lead time, FairTrade Gold sourcing, coloured-stone engagement rings, remodelling inherited pieces, appointment booking) 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 North East 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 saundersandpughe.com as rebuilt, click through every section.