Themesmith
Themesmith
Restoration log · Vol. I
Most small businesses don't need a fresh start. They need their existing site brought back to the standard it was built to. We survey what's there, keep what's worth keeping, and modernise the rest — copy, photographs, brand, customer history. All preserved. Wrapped in bones that work in 2026.
Every brief begins with a survey of the existing fabric. Below is the assessment we ran on Whitfield & Sons last month — a third-generation joinery in Stoke Newington with a site that hasn't been refreshed since 2018. Reproduced here with the customer's permission.
A site like this isn't worth a rebuild from zero. The brief is still here. The brand, the founder's voice, the photographs of the workshop, the testimonials from the 2017 commission and the 2019 refit — all worth keeping. What needs replacing is the wrapper around them: the layout that breaks on phones, the SSL that expired, the form that doesn't reach a real mailbox. That's what restoration is for.
Restoration follows a fixed sequence. Each stage gates the next — nothing is modernised before the originals have been catalogued, nothing is shipped before the new site has been audited side-by-side with the old.
We crawl every page of the existing site and archive its full state — markup, assets, photographs, copy, links, metadata. The original is preserved in a sealed dossier; we never overwrite or delete from the live site. If we get the modernise stage wrong, we can put it back.
Each captured asset is graded against modern standards — accessibility, performance, mobile fitness, SEO, security. Each is marked keep, refresh, or replace. The audit becomes the working contract for the next three stages: nothing the customer wanted to keep gets quietly dropped.
Whatever was graded keep or refresh in the audit gets pulled forward. Copy is re-typeset; photographs are re-cropped to current ratios and uplifted in resolution where possible; testimonials and customer history are preserved verbatim. Voice is sacred — if the founder wrote it, we keep their words.
A modern site is generated around the lifted content — responsive layout, current performance budgets, accessible components, fresh navigation. The visual register matches the brand; the voice matches the founder; the structure matches what the customer actually offers. It feels like the same business, run by the same person, in 2026 instead of 2014.
Domain swap, SSL renewal, redirects from every old URL to its new equivalent so search rankings don't collapse. The old site retires gracefully; yours goes live with no visible downtime. You wake up to the new site, with the old links still working. The dispatch desk holds the lights for the first 48 hours.
Three pages from the Whitfield rescue, photographed at the dispatch desk on the day of go-live. Plate I — homepage. Plate II — services list. Plate III — contact & commission enquiry.
Restoration is editing, not rewriting. The brief, the brand, the customer history — they belong to you. The wrapper around them is what we're here to fix.
Rescue is priced by the page, not by the cycle. You pay for what we restore — no project minimum, no setup fee, no retainer required. Add an ongoing subscription if you'd like the site looked after going forward.
Per page
£20/page
Counted from the existing sitemap. Legal pages — privacy, terms, cookies — are excluded from the count and brought across at no charge.
Per blog post
£10/post
Half the page rate, because most blog posts are body copy without bespoke layout. Categories, tags, and post archive included in the per-page page count.
Site Rescue is a service we're opening to a first cohort of customers this quarter. The Whitfield example you've just read through is illustrative, drawn from the kind of brief we're built to handle — but we're not yet sitting on a wall of testimonials. That's the honest framing.
If you've a site you'd like assessed, write a brief and we'll start with a free condition survey — no commitment, no charge until you approve a plan. Real customer plates from the first cohort will land here as the work ships.
If your site has stopped working — for you, for your customers, for your business — write us a brief and we'll survey it within the week, no charge.
Begin a briefYours, in the workshop.C. Painter · the dispatch desk · May 2026