The Jeweler

Ernie repairs jewelry and watches at a bench inside Washington Square Mall. Nobody finds a shop like that by browsing websites; they find it by searching, or by walking past. So the brief was not really to build a website — it was to make the shop findable, and to make the page convincing in the ten seconds after somebody taps the phone number.

That is why the site publishes his hours, address, phone number and all twelve services in the form Google reads for its business panel — including turning hours he types as plain text into the structured opening times Google expects. It also ships a plain-English summary for AI assistants explaining what this shop is: no online store, no prices without seeing the piece, and a gallery that is a showcase rather than stock.

There is deliberately no cart. He does not sell online, and pretending otherwise would waste a visitor's time and his. What the site does instead is show the work: a gallery you can filter and click through, where any piece opens full-size and moves with the arrow keys, and where a video works anywhere a photo does — the homepage currently turns a custom ring through 360 degrees. Getting video to play reliably on an iPhone was the fiddliest work in the build, and it is invisible when it works, which is the point.

Ernie runs all of it: the gold announcement bar at the top, every heading and paragraph, the photos and their categories, the twelve services, the hours, and the legal pages. Messages from the contact form are saved before the site attempts to email him, so a mail problem cannot lose an enquiry, and he can see whether each notification actually went out.