AS Frames: a framer's site built on what his customers already say

AS Frames is a client of ours: Andrew Saddler’s picture framing business on Potternewton Lane in Chapel Allerton, Leeds, where every frame is measured, cut and fitted by hand. Andrew has been framing for twenty-five years. The new site is built and not launched yet: asframes.com still shows the business’s previous site, and the screenshots here are of the new build.

The brief: let the work and the customers do the talking

The business had a site already, and it made big claims: “UK Wide”, a promise to “guarantee delivery”, “trade prices which will not be beaten”, and “one of the UK’s leading picture frame retailers”. None of them could be shown, and none of them was the reason people use AS Frames. The reasons are in the reviews: Andrew himself, his care, and his advice.

Meanwhile the things that do set the business apart were hidden. The shop opens seven days a week. Andrew visits customers and collects work. He frames shirts and memorabilia, does commercial work for venues, offices, hotels and restaurants, and a curator’s review describes framing for a major exhibition at Leeds City Museum. The old site buried most of that, and spoke about “we” when customers come for Andrew.

So the brief was a site that leads with what is true and checkable, and gets a local customer from “who frames pictures near me” to a quote.

The constraints

• A sole trader. AS Frames is Andrew, not a company, so the site shows no company details it does not have.
• Every job is quoted. A frame depends on the piece, the moulding, the glass and the mount, so there is no price list and no “from” price.
• No new photographs yet. The gallery and the hero have marked places for Andrew’s own photographs, and launch waits for them.
• The Google listing must point at the shop. The reviews belong to the listing, and the listing’s pin needs to sit on Potternewton Lane before the area pages go live.
• Review rules. UK consumer law and Google’s own policy limit how reviews may be shown, so the site quotes them as written and adds no review markup of its own.

What we built

• Sixteen pages a customer can land on: framing, shirts and memorabilia, commercial framing, how pricing works, the work, about Andrew, reviews, contact, and pages for photography, printing and photo restoration, including national pages for the services that travel by post.
• Twenty-six area pages for Leeds and Yorkshire, each a guide to what AS Frames does for that area rather than a copy of the same page with the place name swapped.
• A reviews page that quotes 111 Google reviews as they were written, with filters by the kind of job. It says plainly what is not quoted: the reviews that were a rating with no words, and the one one-star review, which is on Google with all the rest, and it links there.
• An enquiry form that tells the customer they can reply with photographs of the piece, so nothing is uploaded to or stored on the site.

The decisions, and why

Evidence over adjectives. We took out the four claims nobody could check and put a real reference first. A curator’s word on a museum exhibition does more for a buyer than every “leading” and “guaranteed” together.

Andrew, not “we”. 51 of the 111 reviews on the site mention him by name. The site says who does the work.

Hubs for areas, not doorway pages. One page per area, listing everything Andrew does there, rather than a page for every service in every town. Framing stays local because it needs the piece in the shop; printing and photo restoration got national pages because they travel.

No published prices. The pricing page explains what moves the price of a frame, honestly, and invites a quote. An adversarial read of the copy removed every ratio and worked example we could not source.

Glass by courier, prints by post. Glass does not go in the normal post, so the site says how each kind of job travels, rather than promising delivery it cannot make.

Framing first, the rest second. The menu puts framing first and the creative services after it. Giving them equal billing is what made a twenty-five-year craftsman read as a print shop.

What happens at launch

Three things stand between the build and asframes.com: Andrew’s own photographs of his work, the Google listing’s pin on the shop, and moving the domain to the new site. When they are done, the new site replaces the old one, and that is when the analytics, Search Console and the area pages start to count. This write-up then gets screenshots of the live site and its first dated results.

If you run a trade or a local shop and your site says less than your customers do, tell us what you need and we will send you a written quote.