Built by Corey See the live rebuild  ↗
Proposal · prepared for Coombe Gallery · 18 May 2026

A few specific fixes for coombegallery.com

Coombe Gallery · Dartmouth · website rebuild

I rebuild small-business sites in my spare time when I can see they are leaving conversions on the table. I spent an hour on the Foss Street gallery site this morning, knowing Nocturnes opens on Friday and that Mark frames everything upstairs himself. Three things stood out. Below them, a working rebuild you can click through.

Open live preview  ↗ Read the three findings Reply to the proposal
Address · 20 Foss Street, Dartmouth, Devon, TQ6 9DR Director · Mark Riley Lineage · Fourth-generation Riley family (Milos Jiranek to Paul Riley to Mark Riley)
20 Foss Street · Dartmouth · Nocturnes opens 22 May

Four generations of Riley fine art on Foss Street. Open the live preview ↗

Three findings, in order of revenue impact

What the current site is leaving on the gallery wall.

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

01

Four generations of Riley family fine art, never on the homepage.

Observation
Mark Riley is the fourth generation of his family in fine art. Great-grandfather Milos Jiranek (1875 to 1911) founded the Manes Society in Prague and exhibited alongside Rodin and Munch. Grandparents Cecil and Joan Riley were both Slade School of Fine Art alumni. Father Paul Riley was accepted into the Royal Academy summer exhibition at fifteen, one of the youngest ever, and still teaches at Coombe Farm Studios in Dittisham. Mark himself read Art History at Aberdeen and runs the gallery on Foss Street. None of this surfaces on the homepage. The story lives only on the buried About page.
Revenue impact
For a Westcountry collector deciding between Coombe and Dart Gallery (literally next-door on Foss Street), the four-generation Riley provenance is the single strongest credential the gallery owns. A walk-in tourist buying a 200-pound paper-cut and a serious collector buying a Sir Peter Blake silkscreen both care about who curated the room. Burying the lineage on a sub-page loses both.
Cause
The current WordPress zendion-theme homepage is built around the rotating exhibition banner and a navigation strip. There is no editorial space above the fold for a heritage block. The family lineage is treated as About-page copy rather than headline credibility.
After rebuild
After rebuild: a dedicated heritage block on the homepage with the four-generation timeline rendered as typographic editorial copy, the Royal-Academy-at-fifteen detail surfaced as a pull-out, and Person schema on Mark, Paul, Tina and Milos Jiranek so AI assistants and Google rich snippets pick the lineage up. The Riley family becomes the second-strongest credibility moment on the page after the current exhibition.
02

Picture framing rings through to a personal mobile, with one photo and no description.

Observation
The Picture Framing page on coombegallery.com is one paragraph long. The workshop is up the exterior steps from the market square and is reached on Mark's personal mobile, 07890 314 715, because he is upstairs at the bench and the gallery phone is rarely staffed when he is framing. The page mentions "reasonably priced" and "grown organically through word of mouth without advertising" and shows one snapshot (IMG_3554.jpg). It does not explain what the bench can frame, what mouldings are available, what conservation framing means, or what makes Mark the right framer for a Martin Prothero carbon-on-glass versus a Paul Riley watercolour.
Revenue impact
Framing is the gallery's parallel revenue line and the trade Mark practises every working day. The framing customer who needs a Rising-Stars graduate piece mounted for a country house, or a Sir Peter Blake silkscreen properly conserved, currently has to phone a personal mobile from a stub page and trust the word-of-mouth. The page surfaces no credentials. A first-time visitor cannot tell whether the bench frames textiles, three-dimensional pieces, glass-on-glass works (all of which currently hang on the gallery wall).
Cause
WordPress framing page treats the workshop as an afterthought to the gallery. No service grid, no portfolio of framed work, no schema on the framing service, no mention of what Mark himself frames (every piece on the gallery wall is framed by him in-house).
After rebuild
After rebuild: a dedicated framing block surfaces the workshop-up-the-stairs detail, the in-house-framer-is-also-the-buyer line, the range of work the bench handles (textiles, three-dimensional pieces, glass-on-glass like Martin Prothero), and a single clean mobile-callout for the 07890 line. Service schema on the framing service so it appears as a separate offering in search. The framing page stops being a stub and starts being half the proposition.
03

Nocturnes opens 22 May with Royal Academy provenance, but the homepage shows one image and no roster.

Observation
The current homepage carries one image of Josephine Birch's "Midnight" and the headline "NOCTURNES OPENS ON DARTMOUTH GALLERIES NIGHT: 22nd MAY 2026". That is the entire surfacing of an exhibition by three credentialled artists (Josephine Birch, Sarah Gillespie, Martin Prothero) opening this week with the gallery's coordinated late-opening night across Foss Street. The gallery roster behind the show, the Sir Peter Blake / Sandra Blow RA / Barbara Rae RA / Sir Terry Frost names on the Artists page, and the structured-data scaffolding that should accompany a six-week exhibition are all missing.
Revenue impact
An exhibition opening is the single highest-intent moment in a gallery's calendar. The Friday-night opening, the wine, the chance to meet the artists, the Galleries-Night footfall up Foss Street, the social and Instagram coverage that follows. With the current site, a collector landing on coombegallery.com on 21 May sees a single image and a date. They cannot scroll to a roster, an opening-night RSVP, a list of works, an artist statement, or anything tied into the Riley-family curatorial pedigree. The same collector clicking through to Dart Gallery next door gets a fuller picture.
Cause
WordPress zendion-theme exhibition page is a single image and a paragraph. No Event schema, no ItemList for the works, no FAQPage tied to the opening, no roster pull-through from the Artists page. The Dartmouth Galleries Night context is not surfaced anywhere.
After rebuild
After rebuild: the current exhibition becomes the editorial centrepiece. Three named artists with a line each, an opening-night block with the Galleries-Night context and the 22 May 6:00 to 8:30 timing, the gallery roster strung along below as a roll-call (Sir Peter Blake, Sandra Blow RA, Barbara Rae RA, Sir Terry Frost, Bridget McCrum, Jilly Sutton, Paul Riley). Event schema on the exhibition, FAQPage on the opening, ArtGallery schema covering the whole site. The 22 May opening gets the homepage treatment it deserves.
Pricing

Fixed price. No retainer. No agency contract.

One quote, one rebuild, one month of post-launch tweaks. Everything else is optional.

£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.
Next step

If the proposal lands, reply with two or three slots.

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 Westcountry builds this quarter, and first confirmed wins the slot. If I do not hear back by 28 May 2026, the proposal site comes down.

Reply to the proposal Open live preview  ↗
See the live rebuild

A working preview you can click through.

The Riley heritage block, the framing-workshop section, the Nocturnes treatment, the ArtGallery schema. Opens in this tab.

Open preview ↗