The shop has 30 catalogued sections, an AbeBooks profile (member since 2003), Folio Society and First Editions on the shelves, and a customer base that travels for it. The current site is a 2010-era PHP build with a self-signed security certificate that expired on 15 September 2022, no structured data, and no inventory surface. The gap between the shop and the site is the brief.
01
The SSL certificate expired on 15 September 2022, and it was self-signed to begin with.
What I saw Anyone visiting https://broadleafbookshop.co.uk sees a full-page browser warning ("Your connection is not private", "NET::ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID"). The certificate was self-signed (subject CN matches issuer CN) and ran from 15 September 2021 to 15 September 2022, so it has been expired for 32 months. The http URL still serves the site, but Chrome, Safari and Edge all upgrade typed-in addresses to https first, so the warning is the first page a new visitor sees. A bookshop specialising in Folio Society editions and First Editions cannot afford to look like a phishing risk on first impression.
What the rebuild does about it The rebuild ships on Vercel with a free auto-renewing Let's Encrypt certificate, valid http to https, HSTS, redirect at the edge. New visitors land on the site, not the warning. The padlock returns.
02
The public contact address is broadleaf12@aol.com.
What I saw Every page of the shop's site, the AbeBooks profile, the Abergavenny Now listing, the Focus Magazines 2012 piece, and the Brecon Beacons Tourism directory all give the same address: broadleaf12@aol.com. AOL is still functional, but for a buyer about to commit a few hundred pounds to a wood-engraving folio or a King Penguin run, the AOL line at the bottom of the email reads as "I'm not really set up for this size of sale". The address quietly undersells the same care that's gone into 30 sections of curated stock.
What the rebuild does about it The rebuild provisions Google Workspace on broadleafbookshop.co.uk and migrates to joanna@broadleafbookshop.co.uk plus a catch-all info@broadleafbookshop.co.uk. The AOL address can stay as a fallback for the year of overlap. Buyers see a domain-aligned reply address from the first message.
03
The stock that actually sells the shop to the world lives on AbeBooks, not on broadleafbookshop.co.uk.
What I saw The shop's catalogued stock, photography monographs, Folio Society editions, First Editions, the wood-engraving titles, sits behind AbeBooks profile 2946694 with a 4-star seller rating. Searches for "Abergavenny photography books", "Folio Society Wales secondhand", "King Penguin hardback Wales" surface AbeBooks, eBay and other resellers; the shop's own domain is invisible on those queries because it carries no Book or BookStore structured data and no actual inventory pages. A buyer in Cardiff or Bristol who Googles a specific title that's sitting on Joanna's shelf finds someone else selling it.
What the rebuild does about it The rebuild adds BookStore + LocalBusiness schema, a Sections grid covering the actual 30+ category taxonomy from the live Explore page, a "what's in the window this week" trio refreshed monthly, and a phase-2 path to a searchable /stock page driven by a monthly CSV export from the AbeBooks listing. The shop stops handing its long-tail search traffic to AbeBooks.
Pricing Fixed, with no hourly billing.
£2,000Fixed for the rebuild, one off.
£150Per month for hosting and ongoing care.
£50Optional. Embedded chatbot trained on the shop's sections and 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.