01 The homepage names neither the founder, the founding year, nor the only office on Malling Street, and the legal-team page is the only place Andy Horsman, Josie Sonnessa and the 1996 founding are written down at all.
What I saw
The horsmansolicitors.co.uk homepage opens with the tagline "Solicitors & Advocates representing clients since the 1990’s" and a list of Sussex towns covered (Brighton, Crawley, Eastbourne, Hastings, Lewes, Worthing). It does not name Andy Horsman, does not name Josie Sonnessa, does not give a year, does not name a court, and does not point at the 163 Malling Street, Lewes BN7 2RB head office. The 1996 founding date, the 1 November 2011 SRA recognition (SRA 370883), and the April 2024 second-director appointment of Josie Sonnessa as Crown Court department lead are all sourced only via the /legal-team page two clicks deep. A prospective client searching "criminal defence solicitor Lewes" lands on a homepage that reads as one of any dozen Sussex criminal-defence firms rather than as a thirty-year practice founded by a named solicitor at a named address.
What the rebuild does about it
After rebuild: a hero badge that reads "Lewes, since 1996" above the H1, "Andy Horsman" and "Josie Sonnessa" both named in the hero lede with their qualification years and the departments they run (Magistrates and Crown Court), the 163 Malling Street address and the BN7 2RB postcode in the utility bar, the SRA 370883 number in the footer, and a heritage timeline running from the 1996 founding through the 2002 limited-company reincorporation, the 2011 SRA recognition, the 2017 first appointment of Josie Sonnessa, the 2024 second appointment of Josie Sonnessa and the 2026 today. The Lewes office becomes the visible centre of gravity for a Sussex-wide service rather than an unnamed back-end behind a regional landing page.
02 The site is a Wix template with no LegalService or LocalBusiness JSON-LD, no custom og:image, and a generic page title that names no court, no street, no postcode and no solicitor.
What I saw
Pulled the raw HTML of the homepage. The platform is Wix (static.wixstatic.com AVIF image CDN). The structured-data layer carries no LegalService, no LocalBusiness, no Organization, no Person, no PostalAddress, no opening hours, no telephone, no founder, no FAQ. There is no custom og:image set against the page, so a paste of the link into WhatsApp or iMessage unfurls without a card photo. The og:title is the bare phrase "Criminal Defence Lawyer | Horsman Solicitors | Brighton & Sussex", which is broad regional and does not name the Lewes head office. The meta description names no street, no postcode, no court, no solicitor and no out-of-hours number. An AI assistant asked "is there a 24-hour criminal defence solicitor in Lewes I can call right now?" has no structured way to point at this firm by name.
What the rebuild does about it
After rebuild: a full LegalService + LocalBusiness JSON-LD block with foundingDate 1996, founder Person Andrew Charles Horsman, member Person records for Josie Sonnessa and the four other SRA-named solicitors with their qualification years, full PostalAddress for 163 Malling Street Lewes BN7 2RB, telephone in E.164 for the office line and the 01733 out-of-hours line, opening hours, the Sussex coverage area as the areaServed, and a FAQPage block carrying the police-station, Legal Aid and 01733-prefix questions. The og:image becomes a 1599 by 1200 photograph of the Doric-columned 1812 Portland-stone Lewes Crown Court. og:title becomes "Horsman Solicitors, Lewes · 24-hour criminal defence across Sussex, since 1996". The share-on-WhatsApp preview now carries the work the cold-email or the in-person referral used to do alone.
03 The 01733 out-of-hours line sits beside the 01273 office line with no context for the Peterborough-area prefix, so a Sussex client hesitates on the most important number on the site.
What I saw
The /contact page shows two numbers stacked: 01273 474743 for the office and 01733 709060 for the out-of-hours emergency line. The 01273 prefix is Brighton-and-Hove and reads correctly for a Sussex firm. The 01733 prefix is Peterborough-area. A Sussex client who has been arrested at three in the morning and is dialling from a custody-room payphone reasonably hesitates: am I calling the right firm? Is this number current? Will this charge as a national call? The number is in fact the firm’s own national call-handling routing line that reaches the duty solicitor on rota, but no copy on the site explains that. The most operationally important number the firm publishes is the one with the least context attached to it.
What the rebuild does about it
After rebuild: the out-of-hours number is given its own paragraph in the visit block, explaining that it routes through a national call-handling line to the firm’s duty solicitor on rota for the night and that there is no charge for police-station representation if the matter is covered by Legal Aid. The 24-hour proposition becomes a feature of the rebuild, not a hesitation. The FAQ carries a verbatim question "What is the 01733 number? Is your office in Peterborough?" with a verbatim no-it-is-the-overnight-line answer. The procedural Lewes-bonfire-ember accent reserved for the out-of-hours band sits the number visually apart from the rest of the page, the way a real solicitor would underline it on a card.