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Twenty years between Rachel and Jacob at Neal’s Yard Dairy, plus Jacob’s eight years on the Cheeseshift maturation team. Two clicks deep on the About page.
- Observation
- The homepage opens with the tagline "A Neighbourhood Cheesemonger" over a single 800x500 frontage photo. The story that Rachel and Jacob met at Neal’s Yard Dairy, that Jacob spent eight years on the Cheeseshift maturation team, that between them they have twenty years of cheesemonger-ing, and that Neal’s Yard is one of only a handful of British affineurs, all of that lives in body copy on /about-us/. A first-time visitor who opens magdalencheese.co.uk on a phone and scrolls for ten seconds learns none of it.
- Revenue impact
- In Exeter, where Quicke’s and Sharpham are local-cheese household names, the credential that closes the trust gap fast is the Neal’s Yard Dairy alumni line plus the weekly counter rotation that flows from Jacob’s maturation eye. The current homepage spends its hero on a tagline that any neighbourhood cheesemonger could write. Customers searching "cheesemonger Exeter" or "where to buy farmhouse cheese Devon" land on a page that does not surface the actual selling proposition.
- Cause
- The default WordPress Twenty Twenty-One theme has no heritage block, no founder section, no alumni-shelf component on the hero. The 2022 Neal’s Yard Dairy "Cheese Chat" interview with the two of you is the kind of third-party credibility that earns instant trust, and it is not linked from anywhere on the site.
- After rebuild
- The rebuild leads with the Hicks twenty-years-at-Neal’s-Yard line directly under the H1, followed by a dedicated heritage section with the founder portrait and the timeline from the Borough Market beginnings to the October 2021 opening on Magdalen Road. Person schema for Rachel and Jacob. The Neal’s Yard "Cheese Chat" piece linked as a press credit.