Bebb Fine Art: a Shropshire gallery’s whole catalogue, searchable by artist

Bebb Fine Art is a gallery on The Square in Church Stretton, Shropshire, and has been since 1979. It buys and sells original paintings, screenprints, lithographs, etchings and sculpture from 1900 to today, by artists such as Piper, Lowry, Heron, Fedden, Hepworth, Frink and Moore.

Nothing is sold through the website. Every work is price on application, so the site's job is to get people looking and then talking to Roger at the gallery. The gallery buys work too, so the site has to bring in people with something to sell as well as people looking to buy.

A website that had served the gallery for years, with a look its customers knew: a charcoal header with "Est. 1979", gold rules under the headings and works shown three across.

Underneath, it was showing its age. Each page loaded around twenty stylesheets, jQuery and a slider plugin. All 1,463 of its pages had the same title, and there was no sitemap, so Google had very little to go on.

The catalogue was the real asset: 1,104 works, sold and for sale, each at its own web address that people had bookmarked and shared over the years.

The brief said two things mattered most: search, and finding the art by artist. So the site is built around both:

• Recent acquisitions and an archive of sold works, each of which can be narrowed down by artist and by kind of work
• Artists A to Z, with a page for every artist
• A page for every work, with its details and an enquiry form that already names the work, so nobody has to describe the painting they mean
• Search across artists, works, pages and the gallery's journal
• A contact form with a "Selling a work of art" option that takes up to three photos, so a seller can show the gallery what they have from the start
• Opening hours, phone, email and WhatsApp on the contact page, with a title of its own for every page and a sitemap for Google

The first build worked, but it did not look like Bebb Fine Art. It had a design of its own, and the gallery asked for the one its customers already knew. So we rebuilt the look by hand: the charcoal header with "Est. 1979", the same typefaces, the gold rules, works three across and the old menu order. Everything new underneath stayed.

It had also only brought across part of the catalogue. We moved the other 1,060 works over, each at its old address, so a link someone saved years ago still opens the right painting. Eleven Hodgkin prints that the old site had filed under Piper are now under Hodgkin.

And recent acquisitions went back to showing sold works, with a red dot, until they are moved to the archive. That is how the gallery works, and how its regular visitors read the page.

The site went live on bebbfineart.co.uk at the end of October 2026. Any change the gallery asks for goes onto a copy of the site at its own testing address first, and goes live when they approve it.