Mere Antiques · Topsham, Devon · website rebuild
I rebuild small-business sites in my spare time when I can see they are leaving customers on the table. Mere Antiques is one of those. Three things stood out on a cold visit to mereantiques.com this morning. Three findings below, then a working rebuild you can click through.
Single-dealer private shop on the Exe estuary. Forty years of privately-sourced 17th to early 20th century pieces. Open the live preview ↗
Captured 18 May 2026 from mereantiques.com and the 31 December 2024 Wayback snapshot of the same address. Each finding is verifiable in two clicks.
Open mereantiques.com today and the response is a hosting-provider holding page reading "This website has been suspended" with referral links to Antiques Boutique, ph9 antiques web design, and uporium eCommerce. The Wayback snapshot from 31 December 2024 still shows the full OTS Antiques Boutique build, so this is recent. Forty years of trading and the front door of the internet is locked. A prospective customer Googling "Topsham antiques 17th century" finds the suspension page, decides Mere Antiques has closed, and ends up at the 65-dealer Topsham Quay Antiques Centre instead.
After rebuild. A static Astro site on Vercel that will not go down between bills. Same domain, same email. Hosting at fifteen pounds a year on the same edge network the live preview is served from. The "Topsham antiques" Google query returns Mere Antiques again within days of the cutover.
On the suspension page, on directory listings, and on the brief, the trading domain is mereantiques.com. The published email address is info@mereantiques.co.uk. Two different domains for one shop. A customer reading carefully spots it inside ten seconds and starts wondering which is the real Mere Antiques, whether the .co.uk inbox is monitored, whether the .com is even theirs. The archived 2024 contact page lists info@mereantiques.com, so the mismatch is recent too. Either way it is a credibility tell.
After rebuild. One domain, one mailbox. Both .com and .co.uk point to the new Vercel build (the cheap one redirects to the canonical). One info@ address routed through Google Workspace, picked up on the same iPhone as the personal mail. The customer sees one address everywhere and stops doubting which is the shop.
When the live site is up, the archived 2024 source shows: meta description empty (`<meta name="description" content="" />`), title "Mere Antiques - Antiques Specialist based in Devon" with no Topsham reference, no schema.org AntiqueStore or LocalBusiness markup at all, no openingHoursSpecification, no postalAddress, no foundingDate, no priceRange, no FAQPage. The Topsham Quay Antiques Centre across the river has all of this and surfaces in every long-tail Topsham antiques query. Mere Antiques does not.
After rebuild. AntiqueStore + LocalBusiness + Store JSON-LD with PostalAddress for 13 Fore Street, telephone in E.164, openingHoursSpecification for Mon-Sat 10-5, foundingDate 1985, and a FAQPage block on the six questions the counter answers most. An embedded Google Maps tile on the Visit section. Within a fortnight of the cutover, "Topsham antiques 17th century furniture", "Topsham antique silver", and "antique shop Fore Street Topsham" return Mere Antiques in the answer box.
Side-by-side. Left is the live state of the suspended mereantiques.com as of 18 May 2026 (with the 2024 Wayback snapshot used to fill in what the archived version looked like). Right is what the rebuild puts in its place.
No retainer. No contract. No in-person visits. Fully remote from Switzerland.
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 Devon builds this quarter, and first confirmed wins the slot. If I do not hear back by 28 May, the proposal site comes down.