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Proposal · prepared for Bath Old Books · 18 May 2026

A few specific fixes for batholdbooks.co.uk.

Bath Old Books · Bath · website rebuild

I rebuild small-business sites in my spare time when I can see they\'re leaving conversions on the table. On 18 May, looking at the shop\'s online presence from outside, three things stood out. Three findings below, then a working rebuild you can click through.

Open live preview  ↗ Read the three findings Reply to the proposal
Address · 9c Margaret's Buildings, Bath BA1 2LP Phone · 01225 422244 Domain · batholdbooks.co.uk
9c Margaret\'s Buildings · Bath · since c. 1990

Four partners, one antiquarian shop between the Crescent and the Circus. Open the live preview ↗

Three findings · in order of impact

What I noticed looking at the shop\'s online presence from outside.

Each finding is something a passing collector or a probate solicitor can confirm in a minute by trying their own search. The rebuild at /preview/ shows what each one looks like solved.

01

The shop's own domain has been offline for some time.

What I saw
On the morning of 18 May 2026 batholdbooks.co.uk returns ECONNREFUSED on both http and https. The Internet Archive's last meaningful snapshot is a 2017 Yell-hosted form page, so there is no usable site to view in any archive either. A collector who walks past the shop on Brock Street, makes a note of the name, and Googles you that evening lands on a broken-link screen.
Impact
Every Bath-Old-Books query that ought to land on a working homepage instead resolves to nothing. The directory listings (Total Guide to Bath, Visit Bath, PBFA) carry the work the homepage cannot, but every one of those uses a different phone-number-or-email format and none of them tells the four-partner story. The shop's SEO ground is being held by other people's pages, not yours.
Cause
No live host responding on the domain. DNS still resolves, but there is no web server at the other end. (The old oldbookssw.co.uk redirect now points at a Romanian online bookshop, so the second domain has effectively been lost as well.)
After rebuild
The rebuild puts a single, static, well-cached homepage back on batholdbooks.co.uk: hero, the four-partner card, the basement / Jane Austen / topography shelves, opening hours, address, phone, the new shop-routed email, BookStore + LocalBusiness + FAQPage schema, sitemap, robots. Hosted on Vercel's UK edge, sub-100ms first byte. The collector who Googles you that evening sees a working site that confirms what they walked past.
02

The public email is a personal Yahoo address.

What I saw
The address printed on the shop signage and on Visit Bath copy is batholdbooks@yahoo.co.uk. The PBFA member profile and Total Guide to Bath carry a separate batholdbooks20@gmail.com. Both are free-mail consumer addresses on a thirty-five-year-old antiquarian co-operative. George Bayntun and Mr B's, the comparables a visiting collector compares you to, both publish a domain-routed address.
Impact
For a probate / insurance valuation enquiry, or for an Austen-collector's out-of-town first contact, the consumer-mail address is the friction. The PBFA listing carrying a Gmail and the shop window carrying a Yahoo is also a small but real inconsistency that the careful enquirer notices.
Cause
No mailbox provisioned on batholdbooks.co.uk because there is no live host for the domain. The two free-mail addresses have accumulated over the years as different partners took over the inbox.
After rebuild
Google Workspace mailbox on batholdbooks.co.uk with shop@ or enquiries@ as the published address, plus per-partner addresses (nigel@, richard@, matthew@) for the specialism-routed valuation enquiries. The old yahoo and gmail addresses continue to forward in for as long as the partners want them to.
03

The four-partner specialism split, the shop's strongest selling point, is invisible online.

What I saw
Bath Old Books is a co-operative of four (formerly five) PBFA dealers, each running their own specialism inside one shop: Bath / Jane Austen / West Country, children's and illustrated, art / architecture / topography, literature and modern firsts. That structure is the single best answer to "why come here instead of Mr B's or George Bayntun", and it is what 15,000+ volumes across a stair-narrowed basement gets you. None of it is reachable from a Google search today.
Impact
A buyer with a specific question (an Austen first impression, an architectural folio, a vintage Ladybird run) has no way to know which partner answers it, when they are in, or whether the volume is on the shelf. The shop's in-person service is exceptional and the press citations confirm it; the online discoverability layer that would route the enquiry into that service does not exist.
Cause
Same as Finding 01. There is no homepage to host the four-partner story, the per-specialism shelf descriptions, the valuation routing, or the FAQ that would catch the "do you take large collections" enquiry.
After rebuild
A four-card partner block on the homepage with each dealer's specialism and a routed email. A specialism index (Bath / Austen / children's / art / topography / literature) for the long-tail search queries. A "valuations" section explaining probate and insurance work. FAQPage schema so the AI Overview cites the shop on "antiquarian bookshop Bath" and "Jane Austen first editions Bath".
Pricing

Fixed price. No retainer. No contract.

One-off build, optional monthly care, optional embedded assistant. The numbers are the numbers.

£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.
Palette · sampled from the storefront, not picked from a palette site

Bath ashlar, bottle-green door, gilt lettering, antique-leather spines.

Paper #f4ecd8
Ashlar #e9dcc4
Bottle #28482b
Leather #7d3b2a
Gilt #a8843a
Ink #16201b
Next step

If the proposal lands, reply with two or three 20-minute slots.

I take on three Bath builds this quarter, and first confirmed wins the slot. If I don\'t hear back by 28 May, the proposal site comes down.

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