Proposal · prepared for Tivoli Wines · 25 May 2026

A few specific fixes for tivoliwines.co.uk

Tivoli Wines · Cheltenham · website rebuild

I rebuild small-business sites in my spare time when I can see the shop is leaving conversions on the table. Three things stood out in ten minutes on the live site, all on mobile. Three findings below, then a full working rebuild you can click through at /preview/.

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

56 Andover Rd · Cheltenham · since 2010

Tivoli Wines and The Wine Library, run by David and Helen Dodd since 2016. Open the live preview ↗

Three findings, in order of revenue impact

A walk-through of the live tivoliwines.co.uk on 25 May 2026.

01

The Wine Library upstairs is the strongest single thing the shop sells, and the homepage never shows it.

What I saw: The Wine Library opened above the shop in November 2017. It holds thirty-two bottles on Enomatic dispensers, served in 25ml, 75ml or 125ml measures via a pre-loaded charge card. The Cotswold Food Blog called it "the only place of its kind in the Cotswolds" in 2019. The upstairs room is fitted with deep-green Chesterfield sofas, copper coffee tables, exposed-brick walls, and two Georgian windows looking onto Andover Road. None of this appears on the first viewport of tivoliwines.co.uk. A first-time visitor sees a product carousel and a tagline about "delicious wines and tasting events" before they learn the Library exists, the Enomatics are upstairs, or that they can drop in this Friday and pour their own glass of a £150 Burgundy for £8.
Why it matters: The Library is what differentiates Tivoli from every other wine merchant within an hour of Cheltenham. It is the answer to the customer search query "wine bar Cheltenham not stuffy" and to "wine tasting Cheltenham". Burying it three clicks into the navigation hands those queries to anyone who surfaces a tasting-room photo above the fold. Worse, the upstairs space is what justifies a trip in for tourists in town for the races, the Literature Festival, or a Montpellier weekend, none of whom know to dig past the product grid.
Cause: Shopify default theme treats the homepage as a product catalogue. The Library lives in a secondary navigation item under In-store Events. The homepage hero is a stock-style wine-bottle product image with no sense of place or upstairs.
After rebuild: After rebuild: the hero is the shopfront at dusk with The Wine Library sign visible on the side wall. Directly under it, a single Chesterfield-and-Enomatic shot with the line "Pour your own glass upstairs. Thirty-two bottles. From 25ml." A Library section above the product grid with the room photo, the three pour sizes, and a one-click route to the tasting calendar. The customer searching "wine bar Cheltenham" lands somewhere they want to come on Friday.

02

Four point eight stars from one-hundred-and-twenty-one Google reviews, never surfaced above the fold.

What I saw: Tivoli holds a 4.8 average across 121 Google reviews, among the highest-rated wine merchants in Gloucestershire. The most recent review was posted four months ago, the owner replies, and the language reuses words like "knowledgeable", "Tina", and "tasting" again and again. On tivoliwines.co.uk the rating appears once, as plain HTML text inside a small panel near the page foot. A first-time visitor scrolling the homepage on a phone never reaches it. The rating also does not appear in structured data, so Google rich results cannot display the star strip on the search-engine listing either.
Why it matters: A 4.8 from 121 reviews is the strongest social-proof artefact Tivoli has. It costs an independent retailer thousands of hours over five years to earn that, and the asset earns its keep only if a first-time visitor can see it. On a tourist deciding between Tivoli and a chain branch on a phone over coffee, the star rating above the fold is the decision. Right now it is invisible above the fold and invisible to Google.
Cause: Shopify default theme rates panels equally; the rating widget lives in a low-priority placement. No JSON-LD AggregateRating markup, so Google has nothing to render in rich results either.
After rebuild: After rebuild: the rating sits in the hero eyebrow next to the founding year, in a why-strip badge directly under the hero, and as structured AggregateRating data so Google starts pulling stars into the SERP listing. The customer choosing where to buy a £40 bottle for a dinner party reads "4.8 from 121 Google reviews" in the first second on mobile.

03

Shopify default schema only. No LocalBusiness, no Store, no FAQPage. AI assistants cannot cite Tivoli on the queries that should be theirs.

What I saw: A crawl of tivoliwines.co.uk surfaces no application/ld+json LocalBusiness, no LiquorStore, no Store, no Person, no FAQPage, no AggregateRating in structured data. The platform writes Product and Organization markup for the e-commerce side but nothing about the physical shop, the Wine Library, the founders, the opening hours, the 4.8 rating, or any of the questions Tivoli actually gets asked. Compare to a chain wine shop with a well-formed LocalBusiness block and Tivoli loses the rich-results panel on its own search query.
Why it matters: "Wine shop Cheltenham", "wine tasting Cheltenham", "best wine merchant Cotswolds", "English wine Cheltenham", "Wine Library" are increasingly answered by Google rich results and AI assistants reading structured data first. Tivoli should win every one of those queries by default. Without schema, generic chain pages with thinner credentials outrank Tivoli on its own postcode.
Cause: Shopify default. The theme writes the e-commerce schema only. The Library, the rating, the founders, the FAQ all live in body copy, invisible to machine readers.
After rebuild: After rebuild: LiquorStore + LocalBusiness with the Andover Road address, the E.164 phone, the opening hours including the Sunday 11:30 start, AggregateRating 4.8 from 121, Person markup for David and Helen Dodd, an Event schema feed of the Wine Library calendar, and a FAQPage covering the five questions reviewers keep asking. Google rich snippets begin citing Tivoli on the Cheltenham wine query set within weeks of launch.

Stack · what changes

Current Shopify build versus the proposed Astro rebuild.

Current ↗ tivoliwines.co.uk

Platform: Shopify (customised but theme-bound)
Hero: Auto-playing video element + product carousel above the fold
Library: Buried under In-store Events nav item, no homepage placement
Rating: 4.8 from 121 reviews shown as plain text in a small mid-page panel
Schema: Product + Organization only (Shopify default). No LocalBusiness, no Store, no FAQPage, no AggregateRating
Meta: No homepage meta description set; title runs long with pipe + en-dash separators that Google truncates
OG image: Generic Shopify fallback. Forwarded WhatsApp links unfurl blank.

Proposed

Framework: Astro static site (Astro 6) on Vercel edge
Hero: Andover Road shopfront at dusk with the Wine Library sign visible; sub-1.2s LCP
Library: Dedicated Library section above the product grid, with the room photo + 25/75/125ml pour ladder
Rating: 4.8/121 in the hero eyebrow, in a why-strip badge, and as AggregateRating in structured data
Schema: LiquorStore + LocalBusiness + Person × 2 + AggregateRating + Event feed + FAQPage at build time
Meta: Per-page meta descriptions, concise title pattern, OG image set to the Chesterfield-and-Enomatic shot
OG image: Real hero photo. Forwarded WhatsApp / iMessage / Slack links unfurl cleanly.

Pricing

Fixed price, no hourly billing, no surprise tier.

£2,000: Fixed for the rebuild. One off.
£150: Per month for hosting and ongoing care.
£50: Optional. Embedded chatbot trained on Tivoli FAQs and the Wine Library calendar.

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)
• Thirty days of post-launch tweaks at no extra cost
• Source code handed over on day sixty (you own everything)

Next step

If the proposal lands, two or three twenty-minute slots in the next ten days.

I take on three Cheltenham builds this quarter, and first confirmed wins the slot. If I do not hear back by 4 June 2026, the proposal site comes down.

Open the live rebuild ↗ Reply to the proposal

See the rebuild

A working preview you can click through

Opens in a new tab. Built as it would actually deploy, with the shopfront hero, the Wine Library section, full schema, and the rating in the eyebrow.

Open preview ↗