01 A 24-year sole-principal Lewes High Street practice is presented through a Weebly classic template, with the homepage describing itself as "Astburys Solicitor’s welcome home page with phone number, map and brief description of the practice".
What I saw
View-source on astburys.co.uk surfaces the Weebly classic template scaffold (the _W.Commerce, wsite-elements, JsonRPC/CustomerAccounts handlers all visible), the meta description is the auto-generated Weebly line above, and the og:image is a screenshot named download_1_orig.png rather than a photo of John, the office, or Lewes High Street. The whole impression a Lewes resident gets in the first ten seconds is template-grade, when the underlying practice has 24 years of trading on High Street, a sole principal who qualified in 1989, and a fixed-fee schedule that runs from a £350 will to a £1,300 freehold conveyance. The site is selling itself short on the dimensions a private client actually weighs in: continuity, named solicitor, published prices.
What the rebuild does about it
After rebuild: a single hand-built page with John Astbury named in the hero and the Lewes High Street eastward view as the actual photograph; a font pairing of Cardo (display serif) with Inter (body) sized for legibility on a 58-year-old’s phone; a palette sampled from Lewes flint, the chalk of the South Downs, and the brass of the Castle gate ironwork. The page is one HTML file, no Weebly, no template, deployed as a static site that loads under two seconds on 3G.
02 The fixed-fee schedule (£350 single will, £550 mirror wills, £750 grant-only probate, banded freehold conveyancing from £1,300) is buried on a separate "Our prices" page reached only through the Weebly side menu, with no mention anywhere above the fold on the homepage.
What I saw
The "Our prices" page at astburys.co.uk/our-prices.html publishes one of the most disarmingly specific fee schedules a high-street solicitor in Sussex offers: single wills £350 + VAT, mirror wills £550, single Lasting Power of Attorney £300 + VAT plus court fee, paired LPAs £500, couples £650, grant-only probate £750 + VAT (no tax) or £1,200 + VAT (with tax), full estate administration £3,000 to £10,000 quoted in writing, residential conveyancing banded by price band from £1,300 + VAT up to £2,200 + VAT for sub-£1m purchases, the first telephone call free, the initial interview £150 + VAT for an hour. A Lewes resident researching "how much does a will cost in Lewes" would convert on that page the moment they reached it. The homepage hides it behind a thirteen-item Weebly side menu and never quotes a single figure above the fold.
What the rebuild does about it
After rebuild: the four-card service grid on the homepage quotes the fixed-fee headline on every card (£350 single will, £750 grant-only probate, £1,300 freehold from-£0, £150 + VAT initial interview), each card links to the underlying detail, and a "Plain prices, no surprises" eyebrow runs above the section. The full fee schedule sits in the service detail block lower on the page with the disbursement notes intact, so the conversion path collapses from nine clicks to one.
03 There is no opening-hours block anywhere on the site, no LegalService or LocalBusiness JSON-LD, no FAQPage schema, and no Person record for John Astbury, so neither Google nor the LLM assistants now answering legal questions in Sussex surface 24 years of Lewes specialism.
What I saw
View-source on every page on astburys.co.uk surfaces only the Weebly default og: and meta tags. There is no LegalService schema, no LocalBusiness, no openingHoursSpecification, no Person record for John (SRA 350911, qualified 1989, Solicitors for the Elderly member), no aggregateRating, no FAQPage, and no Service records for the four lines the firm actually offers. The practical consequence is that Apple Maps and Google show the Lewes office as "Hours not stated", the named principal does not appear in the knowledge-panel-style results Bing, Perplexity and ChatGPT now build from structured data, and a Lewes resident asking an LLM "who is a Lewes solicitor specialising in wills for older clients" gets named other firms instead.
What the rebuild does about it
After rebuild: a single JSON-LD graph at the bottom of the page declares LegalService with the Lewes House PostalAddress, the E.164 telephone (+441273405900), the SRA 350911 credential, an openingHoursSpecification for Monday to Friday 09:30 to 17:00, a Person record for John Astbury (founder, qualified 1989, Solicitors for the Elderly member, Willaid participant), four Service records (wills and LPA, probate, residential conveyancing, dispute resolution and commercial), and a FAQPage block tied to the on-page FAQ. The static utility bar publishes "Mon to Fri 09:30 to 17:00" as a one-liner so Apple Maps stops saying "Hours not stated".