Elliebells Pottery.
A warm, hand-built site for a Keynsham potter: her work, the story of her new garden studio, and where to find her at the next market.
- Client
- Ellie Bartlett, Elliebells Pottery
- Field
- Hand-thrown stoneware, Keynsham
- What I did
- Design, hand-coded build, image preparation, launch graphics, SEO
- Live since September 2026
- elliebellspottery.co.uk
The brief.
Ellie Bartlett makes hand-thrown stoneware in Keynsham: carved bowls, drip-glazed vases, iron lustre cups, berry bowls and luminaries. She sells it at craft fairs, pop-up shops and Christmas markets. This year she finally built a studio at the bottom of the garden, and she wanted a website that felt as personal as the work.
The first plan was an online shop. As we talked it through, it became clear that wasn't what she needed: every piece is one of a kind, and her customers like to chat before they buy. So the brief changed to something simpler and more honest. Show the work beautifully, tell the story of the studio, say where she'll be next, and make getting in touch effortless.
The build.
Rather than pick a palette from a swatch book, I sampled it from the studio itself: the buttery cream of the door frames, the sage-green cladding, and a dusky pink to warm it all up. The whole site is built from those three colours, so it feels like her place before you've read a word.
Every one of her pieces became a card in a filterable gallery, each with an Ask button that opens an email already naming the piece. No checkout, no stock to manage, just a conversation. A Studio page tells the build story stage by stage, from an empty corner of the garden to a finished workshop, and a Markets page puts her next fair up front, with a calendar download and a map.
Under the hood.
Made for a phone at a market
Most visitors arrive on a phone, often from a stall or an Instagram link. The site is light, loads fast on patchy signal, and was tested in Safari's own engine on iPhone as well as on desktop.
Photographs prepared properly
Ninety-odd of Ellie's own photos, resized, framed consistently and served as modern WebP with JPEG fallbacks. Every one was stripped of its location data, because phone photos quietly record where they were taken.
A studio story told in real photos
The Studio page opens with a short film made entirely from her build photographs, then follows the build stage by stage with a line that draws itself as you scroll.
A fair listing that looks after itself
Her next market shows on the homepage and the Markets page with an add-to-calendar download and directions, and quietly removes itself once the fair is over, so the site is never out of date.
Private by design
No cookies, no trackers, fonts served from the site itself. The privacy page can honestly say visiting doesn't pass anyone's details on.
Found locally
Structured data for the business and for each fair, a sitemap submitted to Google, and share images for every page, so she turns up in local searches and looks right when a link is shared.
Where it stands.
The site went live in September 2026 at elliebellspottery.co.uk, with the .com address pointing to it too. The domain and the hosting account are both in Ellie's name, and the site runs on the same included hosting every client gets, so she owns everything outright. Her existing email kept running untouched throughout.
Alongside the build I made her Instagram launch graphics and a set of business-card designs in the same palette, so everything she hands out or posts looks like it belongs together.
It costs nothing to run, and adding the next fair or a new batch of pots is a quick job rather than a rebuild.
“I didn't really know what I wanted until Tom helped me see I didn't need a shop, just a lovely place to show my pots and tell people where to find me. It feels like me, it looks like my studio, and I actually understand how it all works.”Ellie Bartlett, Elliebells Pottery, elliebellspottery.co.uk
Tell me about
your idea.
No obligation, no hard sell. A friendly chat about what you're after and whether I'm the right fit.
hello@tomchard.uk