Themesmith
Dossier № 042·Site Rescue·Filed May 2026Survey: Whitfield & Sons CabinetmakersInspector — C. Painter
Restoration log · Vol. I
A site that just stopped working.
We bring it back.
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.
§ i. As found
The condition assessment.
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.
As found · whitfieldandsons.co.ukbuilt 2014 · last refreshed 2018
Layout
Fixed-width 960px desktop layout — does not respond to phones below 480px. Common to themes of this vintage.
Poor
Photography
Original 2014 photos at 800×600. Low resolution for modern displays. Worth keeping at higher dpi if originals exist.
Fair
Copy
Body copy unchanged since launch. Voice is good — written by the founder, recognisably theirs. Worth preserving.
Good
Performance
Page load 7.2 seconds on 4G against a 2026 standard of under 2.0. Largest contentful paint at 5.4s.
Poor
SEO
Twelve broken internal links, four pages missing meta description, no schema. Sitemap last updated 2018.
Poor
Contact form
Submits to a mailbox the founder no longer reads. Customer enquiries since 2022 — uncounted, presumed lost.
Poor
SSL certificate
Expired August 2024. Modern browsers display a security warning before opening the page.
Poor
Hosting
Shared hosting, oversold node. Frequent downtime, including a 14-hour outage in February. Site not visible to customers during a Saturday morning.
Fair
Inspector's note
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.
§ ii. The work
Stages of restoration.
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.
S-01 · Scan01
Capture everything, lose nothing.
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.
Captured
- HTML across all pages
- Images at original dpi
- Copy fragments and paragraphs
- Forms and field labels
- Internal link graph
- Existing metadata and schema
S-02 · Audit02
Grade what's salvageable.
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.
Graded against
- WCAG 2.2 contrast and motion
- Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, INP)
- Mobile usability ≥ 320px width
- Discoverability and schema
- Tone of voice consistency
- Contact-path reachability
S-03 · Extract03
Lift the real material out.
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.
Lifted forward
- Founder's body copy
- Original photographs (at higher dpi)
- Customer testimonials, dated
- Service / product list
- Hours, location, contact details
- Brand colour and typography intent
S-04 · Modernise04
New bones, same building.
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.
Modernised
- Responsive layout, mobile-first
- Performance under 2s LCP
- Accessibility passes WCAG 2.2 AA
- Fresh navigation and IA
- Modern contact + booking patterns
- Schema for local search
S-05 · Ship05
Hand-off, without the hand-wringing.
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.
Handed off
- DNS swap, planned window
- 301 redirects from every old URL
- SSL renewal automated
- Sitemap submitted to search
- 48-hour heightened monitoring
- Old site archived to dossier
§ iii. Plates
Before & after.
Three pages from Victory Consulting — a defence consultancy in Worthing, and our first paid rescue: surveyed on Sunday 5 July 2026, live on the firm's own domain by the Tuesday. No mock-ups and no retouching — the ‘as found’ display is the survey's own capture, the ‘as archived’ displays are the Internet Archive's February 2024 records verified word-for-word against the survey, and every restoration is the page as it serves today. Click any plate to read the full dossier.
Plate I · As found
Plate I · As restored
Plate I. Victory Consulting, homepage — surveyed and restored, July 2026. The survey's capture of 5 July beside the page now live: same firm, same words on the door; the register lifted from template to capability statement.Survey → live: 2 days
Plate II · As archived
Plate II · As restored
Plate II. The capability register — before, as archived February 2024; after, as it serves today. The same eight disciplines, word for word, reset in the vocabulary of defence acquisition.Archive record: Feb 2024 · verified at survey
Plate III · As archived
Plate III · As restored
Plate III. The enquiry desk — the template's bare form beside one that reaches a monitored mailbox, the firm's confirmed details beside it.Pages: 7 of 7 rebuilt
§ iv. Diff
What we keep, what we replace.
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.
Keepyour work, your story
- Body copy — every paragraph the founder wrote.
- Photographs — uplifted in resolution where originals exist.
- Brand — colours, typography intent, voice register.
- Customer testimonials — verbatim, dated, attributed.
- Service or product list — restructured for clarity, not edited for content.
- Contact details — hours, location, phone, email.
- Founding story — page architecture, names, dates.
- Existing URLs — redirected, so old links still work.
- Search rankings — preserved through structured 301s.
Replacethe failing fabric
- Layout — fixed-width desktop, replaced with responsive 2026 bones.
- Performance — modern build pipeline, edge caching, optimised assets.
- Accessibility — colour contrast, focus rings, reduced-motion paths.
- Hosting — shared, oversold servers — replaced with enterprise infrastructure.
- SSL — expired or absent, renewed automatically going forward.
- Contact form — broken or unreachable, routed to a working address.
- Metadata & schema — missing or outdated, brought up to current standards.
- Mobile experience — broken below 480px, rebuilt mobile-first.
- Browser compatibility — old polyfills retired, modern baselines adopted.
§ v. Rates
The rate schedule.
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.
Included in every rescue
- Full crawl & archive
- Asset uplift
- 301 redirect map
- SSL renewal
- Sitemap submission
- 48-hour heightened monitoring
- Old site archived in dossier
- Editorial review pass
§ vi. Note
Where we are in May 2026.
A note from the desk
Site Rescue is a service we're opening to a first cohort of customers this quarter. The Whitfield survey in § i is illustrative, drawn from the kind of brief we're built to handle — but the plates in § iii are real: our first paid rescue, shipped in July 2026. 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. More customer plates will land here as the first cohort's work ships — the first is now on file: read the Victory Consulting dossier.
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
Filed by the dispatch deskEnd of Dossier № 042Themesmith.ai Ltd · Brighton