Updated website for Rowley’s the Jewellers

Making an established ecommerce website easier to manage, easier to shop and ready for its next chapter

Rowley’s the Jewellers has been part of Penarth since 1963. A family-run independent jeweller, the business combines traditional service and craftsmanship with contemporary jewellery, watches and gifts from a carefully selected range of brands.

Candid originally created the Rowley’s ecommerce website in 2020, as a straightforward, cost-effective online shop in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As the business and its online presence evolved, however, the requirements of the website changed too.

Rather than starting again, we returned to the existing site to give it its natural next stage of development: a refreshed customer experience combined with a much simpler system behind the scenes.

The challenge

The original website was intentionally built around a largely out-of-the-box ecommerce setup, reflecting the scope and budget available at the time. More bespoke content management, automation and tailored functionality weren’t part of that original commission.

Six years later, keeping the website current had become more demanding on the in-house team. Products could remain online after selling, homepage content changed infrequently and routine updates could feel like a significant job rather than a natural part of running the shop.

Our challenge therefore wasn’t simply to make the website look better. It was to make it work better and easier to own.

We wanted the Rowley’s team to be able to add products, manage stock, create collections and update key information themselves, without needing to understand WordPress page building or worry about the design of the site.

A website that does more of the work

The refreshed website is built around a simple principle: Rowley’s manages the content. The website manages the layout. Candid manages the technology.

Rather than asking the client to manually build and maintain pages, we created reusable layouts and structured content that automatically populate from the information entered elsewhere on the website. The original proposal specifically identified this separation of content from design as a way for the team to update information without worrying about design or layouts.

Products now feed automatically into categories, collections, brands and featured areas. Selected collections can be surfaced on the homepage without editing the homepage itself, while product templates take care of presentation, related products and repeated trust messaging.

The result is a site that can remain active simply through the normal process of managing products.

A simpler way to shop

The customer-facing website has been refreshed too, retaining Rowley’s established navy identity while introducing a lighter, more spacious visual language.

The homepage now gives customers several intuitive routes into the products, including curated collections such as Gifts for her, Made in Wales, Staff favourites and Wedding and engagement, alongside price-led gifting options and featured products.

A dedicated Browse experience brings together traditional product categories, curated collections and Rowley’s key brands, allowing customers to shop according to what they are looking for rather than navigating one large catalogue.

Individual product pages have also been redesigned around a consistent template, bringing together product information, purchasing, trust messages and related products in a much clearer format.

Connecting online with the shop

One important part of the brief was recognising what the website isn’t.

For an independent jeweller such as Rowley’s, maintaining every single item of shop stock online simply isn’t realistic. Instead of allowing that to become a limitation, we made it part of the customer journey.

Product pages actively remind customers that “There’s always more in store”, positioning the website as a curated window into the Rowley’s range and encouraging customers to visit the Penarth shop to discover more and receive personal advice from the family team.

It creates a much more useful relationship between ecommerce and bricks-and-mortar retail: the website can sell products directly, but it can also do the equally important job of bringing people through the shop door for a more personalised shopping experience.

Designed for gradual ownership

The work behind the scenes was just as important as the visual redesign.

The behind-the-scenes WordPress experience has been simplified around the tasks Rowley’s actually needs to perform with a customised WordPress dashboard, including adding products, changing stock, featuring products and managing collections. The original plan was deliberately to make the administration area feel more like a small bespoke content-management system than the out-of-the-box WordPress backend.

We also created guidance and delivered training sessions as a gradual process rather than expecting the client to become a website manager overnight.

It’s a different way of thinking about a website handover: giving the client greater ownership of the things they know best, while Candid continues to take care of the design, technical framework, maintenance and future development.