Built by Corey / Proposal for Ogden of Harrogate
Current site  ↗ Open live preview  ↗
Proposal · prepared for Ogden of Harrogate · 19 May 2026

A few specific fixes for ogdenharrogate.co.uk

Ogden of Harrogate · 38 James Street · 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 mobile in the first ten minutes on the live site. Three findings below, then a working rebuild you can click through.

Open live preview  ↗ Read the three findings Reply to the proposal
Harrogate showroom · 38 James Street, HG1 1RQ Trading since · 1893 Family generations · five
38 James Street · Harrogate · HG1 1RQ

The Ogden family at 38 James Street, since 1893. Five generations, one shopfront.

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 ogdenharrogate.co.uk on 19 May 2026, with a focus on the heritage and royal-patronage register the current Shopify theme buries.

01

The 132-year, five-generation Ogden family story is the moat the site never lets the visitor see.

What I saw
On a fresh mobile load of ogdenharrogate.co.uk, the first viewport is a stock Shopify carousel of luxury-watch banners and a four-tile product grid. Neither "1893" nor any Ogden first name appears above the fold. The phrase "fifth generation" appears nowhere on the homepage. James Roberts Ogden, Glen Ogden FGA, Ben Ogden FGA and Robert Ogden are all named on /pages/company-history and /pages/about-us, three clicks deep. A first-time visitor researching a family jeweller, a wedding ring, or an heirloom remount has no reason to believe Ogden is materially different from any other Shopify multi-brand watch retailer.
Cause
The site runs the stock Shopify Dawn-family theme behind Cloudflare. Theme default puts product-carousel first, brand-logo carousel second, footer-link heritage third. The order is correct for an authorised-dealer watch retailer and wrong for a 132-year family jeweller whose royal-patronage register and museum-grade antique-jewellery expertise are the entire competitive moat.
After rebuild
After rebuild: the first viewport names the founder (James Roberts Ogden, 1893) and the current generation (Ben Ogden FGA and Robert Ogden, the fifth) in a single hero strap-line. The heritage block becomes the spine of the page, with a vertical five-generation timeline (JRO, William and brothers, the 1946 grandsons, Glen, then Ben and Robert) and a royal-patronage register naming Edward VII, the Shah of Persia, the Duke of Kent, Earl Jellicoe, Winston Churchill, and King Charles III as separate cells. The Rolex, Longines, Baume and Mercier portfolio sits in the service grid below the heritage band, where it converts visitors who have already understood why Ogden is in Harrogate in the first place.
02

Royal commissions, the Tutankhamun connection, and the British-Museum advisory work are scattered across separate pages a typical visitor will never reach.

What I saw
The 130-Years-of-Ogdens page lists the Edward VII collet for Princess Maude (1914), the Shah of Persia personal-jeweller designation, the Duke of Kent Art-Deco remodel of Queen Alexandra’s jewels (1934), the Churchill cigar box (1944), the Eleanor Roosevelt silver tureens (1942), the Earl Jellicoe gold casket (1927), the silver Pump Room model (1927) and the 2006 Breguet presented to King Charles III. The Company History page tells the JRO Tutankhamun story, the Howard Carter and Sir Leonard Woolley correspondence, the "Advising Goldsmith to the British Museum" title, and Dr Jack Ogden’s authorship of Jewellery of the Ancient World (1982). None of this reaches the homepage. The phrase "Royal Pump Room" returns zero hits in the home document. The provenance that no Harrogate competitor can match is invisible to the visitor who lands and scrolls once.
Cause
A typical small-business site optimised for product sales suppresses heritage to make room for the product grid. For a 132-year-old family jeweller with verifiable royal and museum provenance, that is the wrong trade-off. The Royal Hall presentation to the then-Prince of Wales in 2006 is a single line on a third-tier page. It deserves to be a homepage block.
After rebuild
After rebuild: a six-cell royal-patronage register sits directly under the heritage timeline. Each cell carries a year, the named royal or dignitary, and a one-line description of the commission. The Tutankhamun and British-Museum work occupies its own specialism block, named, sourced, and not buried. The current site’s product grids continue to do their job lower down the page.
03

The site has no JewelryStore JSON-LD, no LocalBusiness markup for 38 James Street, no FAQPage schema, and a generic stock-theme Open Graph card.

What I saw
View-source on the homepage shows the stock Shopify theme schema: a single Organization block carrying the site URL and the bare logo. No JewelryStore @type, no PostalAddress for 38 James Street HG1 1RQ, no openingHoursSpecification for the 09:30-to-17:00 Monday-to-Saturday pattern, no AggregateRating, no FAQPage. The og:image is the default theme share card, so links pasted into WhatsApp or Slack unfurl as a generic Shopify preview, not as the Edwardian James Street shopfront. Google has nothing to render as a rich snippet; a search for "ogden harrogate" returns a plain blue link where competitors with proper schema show stars, address, and hours directly in the result.
Cause
Shopify’s base schema generator emits Organization only. The richer JewelryStore subtype, LocalBusiness with full address and hours, FAQPage, and a customised og:image all require either a paid Shopify app or hand-written JSON-LD. Neither is in place.
After rebuild
After rebuild: a single JewelryStore JSON-LD block carries the full 38 James Street PostalAddress, telephone in E.164, web.ogden email, the Monday-to-Saturday 09:30-to-17:00 opening hours, founder James Roberts Ogden as a named Person, and an areaServed of Harrogate. A FAQPage block surfaces the five customer-voice questions from the live site. The og:image points at the actual Edwardian shopfront photograph, hosted on the rebuild domain. A link pasted into WhatsApp now unfurls as the James Street frontage with the wordmark legible.
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.
£50
Optional. Embedded chatbot trained on heritage, royal-patronage, watch-brand and bespoke-bridal questions.

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 North Yorkshire builds this quarter, and first confirmed wins the slot. If I do not hear back by 29 May 2026, the proposal site comes down.

See the live rebuild  ↗
A working preview you can click through.
Opens in a new tab. Best read on a phone first, then a laptop.