Ford Framing, Beverley.
A picture framer five minutes from my desk has been doing the same job longer than I’ve been alive. I’ve walked past their shop window most weeks for the better part of two years without going in. This is a piece about their website.
Subject: fordframing.co.uk →
Ford Framing opened on 20 February 1989 at 43 North Bar Within, Beverley. They’ve framed 272,000 pictures since. Seven framers on staff. One of them — at some point in the company’s history — framed a picture that was presented to the Queen on her visit to Beverley. The shop is one of those places you notice in the way you notice a good butcher: it’s done what it’s doing for so long that you stop seeing it as a business and start seeing it as part of the street.
Their website does not communicate any of that.
It is not a bad website. WordPress, blue navigation bar, a rotating hero with stock photography of art collectors looking thoughtful in galleries. The structural decisions are mostly fine. The address is on the page. The phone number is on the page. The opening hours are accurate. The contact form works.
What’s missing is them.
What’s already strong
There are real strengths the site already has, which is the thing that makes it worth writing about.
The two-site model — workshop in Market Weighton, shop in Beverley — is unusual and useful. They’ve set up so they can make the frame to the millimetre at the workshop and customers can come into a high-street gallery to choose mounts and glass. Most local framers run one or the other. They run both.
The Fine Art Trade Guild training standard for all staff is a real credential — fewer than two hundred framers in the country sit above it. The site says so, once, halfway down an About paragraph.
“272,000 pictures framed” is, by a wide margin, the single most powerful sentence on the website. It is currently buried below the fold on the About page.
What I’d lift
Three things.
1. The URLs.
Every internal link looks like ?page_id=1354 or ?slz-service=bevery-shop. That’s WordPress’s default behaviour with permalinks set to “Plain” — a switch in the admin you’ve never had to touch. A two-minute fix turns those into /about and /beverley-gallery. Google reads them properly, customers can read them in the address bar, and the site stops looking like it was set up in 2008.
2. The hero should show one of their own frames.
The current carousel uses stock photography — pleasant images of people in galleries that could be any framer in the country. They have 272,000 pictures of real, well-made frames sitting in their own files. A single hero image of one actual Ford-made frame, on an actual wall, with the artist credited beneath, would say more in three seconds than the rest of the homepage says combined. Camera advice, if it’s useful: north window, daylight, framed piece on the wall at eye height, phone resting on a chair so it’s level. That’s the shot.
3. The Queen sentence belongs on the homepage.
Not in the navigation, not in the hero. Just a single line, somewhere between the fold and the contact button: “Ford Framing made the frame for a picture presented to Her Majesty the Queen on her visit to Beverley.” That’s a trust signal that takes one sentence and earns a customer for a decade.
A stranger writing from down the street
I don’t know who at Ford Framing decides what the website says. I haven’t met them. This essay is a stranger writing about their work from a few streets over, and a stranger can be wrong. There may be reasons the Queen sentence is buried that I don’t know about. There may be a brand decision behind the stock photography. The whole point of the Site of the Month is that I write before I’m hired, before I know. That’s the risk the format takes.
Why this site, this month
I picked Ford Framing for Vol. I because it is the kind of small, sturdy, owner-led business this whole studio exists for, and because a frame-maker and a website-maker have more in common than either profession would admit. We are both the thing that holds the work. The frame is invisible if it’s right; the website is invisible if it’s right. When either is wrong, the work suffers from a problem that isn’t the work’s fault. That’s a discipline worth taking seriously.
If anyone at Ford Framing reads this and would like an unpaid ninety minutes of the three lifts above on a test environment — switch the permalinks, replace the hero, surface the Queen sentence — say the word. The offer is real. No invoice, no follow-up. The 272,000 should not be hidden.
Vol. I · Published 22 June 2026 · Beverley · Back to the ritual →