Letters in Linen

Letters in Linen makes handcrafted, personalised lettering canvases for homes and gifts, and sells in the UK. Its previous website was a client-side rendered app: content depended on JavaScript to appear, and every page carried the same title.

The aims were custom-order enquiries and visibility in search for personalised and lettering canvas terms, on pages that load quickly and that search engines can read as plain HTML. There are no online payments. Visitors browse the catalogue, then request a quote for a custom piece.

Design direction was set with search in mind from the start. Before any design work, each type of page was given a target term and a search intent: the home page, the gallery, a page for each artwork, the canvas builder, the guides hub and the guides themselves. The layouts were then shaped by what each page needed to answer.

The client wanted something less rigid than the previous grid layout: rounded and organic, with waves, brushstrokes and flowing section edges, in the existing colour palette. Mobile and desktop were designed as separate compositions rather than one scaled down from the other.

Headings, copy and navigation are real HTML text, so the design never depends on script or images to be readable.

The site is a custom WordPress theme with ACF. There is no page builder. Every heading, paragraph, button and list on every page is a field in the WordPress admin, so the client can edit it without touching code.

Artworks and guides are their own content types, and the gallery and guides hub are ordinary pages. The Canvas Builder, a four-step tool for designing a custom canvas, was rebuilt as a plain HTML form that works without JavaScript, with the live preview added on top for browsers that can run it.

Photographs are resized and served as WebP with set dimensions, and images below the first screen load lazily.

• Every page has its own title, meta description and canonical URL, and a single H1.
• Pages are server-rendered, so the content and links are in the HTML that search engines receive rather than built by script.
• An XML sitemap generated by WordPress lists every public page, and robots.txt points to it.
• Structured data: Organization, WebSite and breadcrumbs on pages, a Product with its price on each artwork, and an Article on each guide.
• Open Graph and Twitter tags on every page.
• The guides hub is paginated, and each page of it has its own canonical URL and a numbered title.
• Images on the artwork pages and the guides carry alt text.

The site was built and checked on a private staging copy that search engines could not index, then launched on the client’s own domain in October 2026. The sitemap and robots.txt were live from the first day.

At launch it held 74 public URLs: 7 pages, 10 artworks, 2 gallery categories and 55 guides.