Westchester Coin & Currency

Work | Apr 25 2026 | Tom Von Lahndorff

Westchester Coin & Currency

Greg buys and sells coins and old paper currency out of Westchester. He needed a simple, professional site that made it easy for people nearby to find him, get a sense of who he is, and reach out for an appraisal. No e-commerce, no fancy framework — just a clean, fast site that does its job.

The Build

Built with plain PHP and CSS. No build step, no JavaScript framework, no dependencies to babysit. The whole thing loads in well under a second and works fine without JavaScript at all. For a small business site, that's the right answer — it's cheap to host, easy to update, and there's nothing to break.

The design leans into the subject matter. Warm cream backgrounds, deep brown text, gold accents. Source Serif and Playfair for the type. It feels like the kind of place where someone who knows what an 1899 silver certificate is actually works.

What's On It

• Hero with a search bar that goes straight into the currency database
• "What We Do" section covering coin and currency buying and selling
• A short "About" pitch and a "Meet the Owner" section with a photo and bio
• Free guides on grading, identifying counterfeits, and what makes a bill collectible
• Browsable database of US national bank notes searchable by city, state, charter number, and bank name
• Article system for longer-form content (history, tips, market notes)
• Contact form that goes straight to Greg's email

The Database

The currency database is the centerpiece — thousands of US national bank notes searchable by city, state, charter number, or bank name. No MySQL, no Postgres, no SQLite. Just CSV files read directly from disk. PHP loads them once, indexes them in memory, and serves results in milliseconds. For a read-heavy dataset that updates rarely, it's faster than a real database and there's nothing to administer. The CSVs live in git alongside the code, so updates are just a commit and a deploy.

The SEO Angle

This is where most of the actual work went. For a local business, getting found in search is the whole game. So the site has:

• Per-page meta titles, descriptions, and Open Graph tags managed centrally
• Schema.org structured data for local business, articles, and the currency listings
• A real sitemap (not auto-generated junk — actually curated)
• Fast page loads, mobile-first responsive layout, semantic HTML
• Internal linking between guides, articles, and the database so Google can crawl the depth

The currency database alone is thousands of pages — every bank, every charter — each with its own URL and metadata. That gives Google a lot to chew on for long-tail searches like "Citizens National Bank Tarrytown $10 note."

The Real Takeaway

Most small business owners get talked into overbuilt sites running on platforms they can't maintain. This is the opposite — a site that does what Greg actually needs, runs forever on cheap hosting, and shows up when people search for what he sells. KISS wins.