Do you pierce ears? Yes.

Since 2005 Joost, Jessica and their team have been welcoming customers to their shop on the Stationsstraat in Oosterwolde, in the north of the Netherlands. Jewellery, watches, workshop and service. The previous site was a WordPress one-pager from 2020 that stayed politely quiet about all of it.

The new one runs on Kirby and is built around something else: not what a jeweller likes to say about itself, but the questions they get asked most in the shop and on the phone. Starting with one in particular. See for yourself at juweliersimons.nl.

Yes. From the age of four, no appointment needed. It appeared nowhere on the old site, even though it is the question they are asked most — and therefore the question people kept phoning about. Now it has a page of its own, covering how it works, what to know about aftercare, and when you can simply walk in.

Same with the brands: customers rang to ask whether they stock something, so that list now sits on every page where it matters. And the top of the site says whether the shop is open right now, worked out from the opening hours they keep themselves. A website is allowed to let the phone rest.

There is an online window with the gold and silver collection, so you can browse from the sofa. But a piece of jewellery only lands once you are holding it, and a watch is sized to your own wrist. The watch brands are deliberately not online: you find those in the shop, with advice attached.

The site is built around that idea. It inspires, and then points you towards the Stationsstraat. That online window runs on a platform Simons shares with other jewellers, and there are rules about how you link into it. We sorted that out once, properly, so nobody has to think about it again.

The Simons mark is two rotated hexagons with a small brilliant between them: J✕J, Joost and Jessica. The entire visual language of the site comes out of it. Hairlines instead of boxes, clipped corners, and a line animation that redraws the logo as the page opens.

Plus twelve small hexagons: the birthstones. Pick a month and you see straight away what the web shop has for that stone. Looking for something for a May birthday? You start at emerald — and you don’t have to go and look that up first.

The site sets no cookies. Visits are counted with Fathom, without cookies and without personal data, and the fonts sit on their own server rather than at Google. So no cookie banner is required, and the privacy statement fits on one screen. Nobody is mourning it.

The admin runs on Kirby, with fields named after what they do. The team edits its own text, photos and opening hours — and before launch they added a page about commitment rings themselves, without asking us anything. That is the best compliment an admin screen can get.

Not through a tender. Joost and our Yann know each other from Round Table, a service club where members run projects and raise money together, and where you mostly meet a lot of people who run something themselves. Both sat on the national board of their club — Joost in the Netherlands, Yann in Belgium. Yann was national president in 2015-16 and international president in 2017-18.

That sounds grander than it feels. Mostly it means a great many meetings, a great many airports, and an address book that never empties again. Years later a jeweller from Oosterwolde calls about a new website. That is how these things go.

A web shop sells products. A website can do something else: say why people walk through your door, and answer the questions that would otherwise make the phone ring. Curious what that looks like for your business? Get in touch.