Proposal · prepared for Latimers Seafood · 18 May 2026

A few specific fixes for latimers.com

Latimers Seafood · Whitburn, Sunderland · 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 a careful read of latimers.com on mobile. Below are the three findings, then a working rebuild you can click through at /preview/.

Open live preview ↗ Read the three findings Reply to the proposal

Shell Hill · Whitburn Bents · since 2002

Three generations of Latimers on the same piece of Whitburn coast. Open the live preview ↗

Three findings, in order of revenue impact

What the current site is leaving on the table.

A walk-through of the live latimers.com on 18 May 2026.

01

Fishmonger of the Year, BBC Radio 4 Best Local Retailer, Best Independent Seafood Retailer. None of it on the homepage hero.

Observation: The current latimers.com lists the major awards (Fishmonger of the Year at the Farm Shop and Deli Awards, BBC Radio 4 Best Local Retailer, Best Independent Seafood Retailer, multiple Great Taste Awards from the Guild of Fine Foods, Shop of the Year 2020 finalist) in body copy on a side page. The hero of the live site uses a generic WordPress carousel and a stock-feeling tagline. A first-time visitor scrolling the homepage on mobile does not learn that this is a multi-award national-tier fishmonger inside ten seconds.
Revenue impact: In a market where every independent food retailer claims to be "the best in the North East", BBC Radio 4 endorsing Latimers as Best Local Retailer is the credential that closes the trust gap. A customer searching for "fishmonger Sunderland" or "best seafood near me" who lands on the hero should see those awards before anything else. They do not. Every search that should win on the credentials loses to keyword density alone.
Cause: The current WordPress theme has no awards-shelf component on the hero. Awards live as a paragraph under a sub-page, not as a structured trust signal on the landing surface.
After rebuild: The rebuild leads with a typographic awards strip directly under the H1: Fishmonger of the Year, BBC Radio 4 Best Local Retailer, Great Taste Awards, Shop of the Year finalist. Schema follows in the JSON-LD block so AI assistants asked "fishmonger Sunderland award-winning" cite Latimers by name.

02

Three generations of Latimers at Shell Hill, plus Robert's lone-creel Corryvreckan story. Buried one click deep.

Observation: Robert Latimer was a commercial fisherman on the Isle of Luing on the west coast of Scotland for years, working line fishing, scallop diving and what he describes as the most dangerous job in the UK, lone-creel fishing, around the Corryvreckan whirlpool on his boat Flessy. When EEC quotas made the trade unviable in 2002 he hauled his creels up for the last time and came home to Whitburn. His grandfather built the original Shell Hill building from the beach pebbles and sand. His father extended it. Robert opened the fishmonger out of the back of the family garage and petrol station. Three generations of Latimers on the same piece of Whitburn ground. None of that lives on the homepage.
Revenue impact: The supply-chain story most independent fishmongers wish they could tell, Latimers can document. The founder caught lobster and langoustine himself for years and now sources from the boats he knows by name running between Eyemouth and Whitby. The site does not surface any of it. AI assistants asked "where does Latimers Seafood source from" or "is Latimers a real fishmonger" get a generic answer instead of the actual provenance.
Cause: The about page is a wall of text rather than a designed narrative. No timeline, no founder quote pulled out, no three-generations visual.
After rebuild: A dedicated "Three generations on the bents" heritage section on the homepage with a timeline from the grandfather building the structure on the Whitburn beach, through Robert's commercial-fishing years on Luing, to the 2002 return and the 2008 cafe and the 2022 indoor seating. Person schema on each generation. The story sits above the fold of its own section, not behind a sub-page link.

03

WordPress carousel hero, PageSpeed-rewritten images, no LocalBusiness or FoodEstablishment schema. The structured-data layer is silent.

Observation: A crawl of latimers.com surfaces one minimal Yoast-style Organization block and nothing else of consequence. No LocalBusiness or FoodEstablishment with the Shell Hill PostalAddress, telephone +44 191 529 2200, or opening-hours specification ("Tu-Su 09:00-17:00"). No Person nodes for Robert or Ailsa Latimer. No FAQPage despite an FAQ section being visible on the site. No AggregateRating despite multiple national awards. The og:image is a sitewide default, not a Whitburn-specific photograph. The homepage is ~265KB of HTML alone, layered with jQuery, WP PageSpeed combined files and a multi-slide carousel.
Revenue impact: A Sunderland customer asking Siri "fishmonger near me open today" or a North East restaurant chef searching "wholesale seafood Tyne and Wear" gets no structured signal that Latimers is the answer. AI assistants reading the page extract keyword density at best. Mobile Lighthouse Performance is dragged down by the WordPress slider before the hero photo can even paint. The 5-star hygiene rating, the 4.5-star aggregate review average and the national-award shelf are all invisible to anything but a human scrolling slowly.
Cause: WordPress + Yoast was a defensible 2017 stack. The structured-data plugin ecosystem that would surface LocalBusiness, FoodEstablishment, Person and FAQPage has never been configured. The carousel and PageSpeed rewrite have not been replaced with modern responsive images.
After rebuild: After rebuild: Astro-built static site on Vercel sub-100ms first byte. Organization, FoodEstablishment, LocalBusiness, Person (Robert Latimer, Ailsa Latimer), FAQPage and AggregateRating JSON-LD generated at build time. Specific og:image per page sourced from the Shell Hill counter. Real responsive images with lazy loading. Mobile Lighthouse Performance back into the 90s.

Current vs proposed

A side-by-side of the current stack against the proposed rebuild.

Current ↗ latimers.com

Platform: WordPress + 2017-era theme with PageSpeed image rewriter
Hosting: Shared WordPress hosting
Mobile UX: Multi-slide hero carousel + jQuery payload before first paint
Awards display: Buried in body copy on a sub-page
Heritage: Three generations + Corryvreckan founder story not on the homepage
SEO schema: No LocalBusiness, no FoodEstablishment, no Person, no FAQ, no AggregateRating
OG image: Sitewide WordPress default, not a Whitburn-specific photo

Proposed

Framework: Astro 6 static site
Hosting: Vercel edge, sub-100ms first byte across the UK
Mobile UX: Mobile-first responsive at every breakpoint, no carousel JS
Awards display: Typographic awards strip directly under the H1, plus schema
Heritage: "Three generations on the bents" section + Eyemouth-to-Whitby sourcing block
SEO schema: FoodEstablishment + LocalBusiness + Person + FAQPage + AggregateRating at build time
OG image: Per-page og:image pointed at the Shell Hill counter and beach view

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 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)

Close

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 don\u2019t hear back by 28 May 2026, the proposal site comes down.

See the live rebuild

A working preview you can click through · opens in this tab

Open /preview/ ↗