We enjoyed working with The King’s Ditch pub, in Staffordshire, to design their new website at the end of 2014.
For any hospitality business, having a web presence is clearly an essential part of the marketing strategy. A website is not only useful for communicating with regular customers, but it’ll also help to pull in new customers too.
For the King’s Ditch pub, we came up with this web design, which is prominently a one-page design. This means it loads quickly on mobiles and conveys all the important information on a single scrolling page, rather than users having to switch between several pages to find basic information. Only the news and blogs are listed on separate pages, so the home page doesn’t become too crowded.
The website works well on smartphones, which of course is highly important for hospitality businesses.
Web design for pubs – what needs to be included?
The web design we created for this pub compromises of the following blocks:
- An introductory section, explaining what the pub offers.
- Opening times, visible in a prominent position, which was designed with a chalkboard-style effect.
- A clickable drinks and bar snacks menu (see below).
- News and blog section.
- A photo gallery (featuring photography by Primary Image).
- A customer reviews / testimonials box.
- History and background to the pub.
- Associations and trade memberships.
- Location and contact details.
- And finally, social media links.
The menu
The drinks menu is a key feature of the website. It’s kept up-to-date each week and shows current ales and ciders available. This is a handy facility for tempting customers to come in and try new beers, before the barrel is empty! Beers are also promoted on the pub’s Facebook page.
The pub’s management team can easily login and update the menu themselves. A special module, within the WordPress software, allows them to enter details of each beer:
When a barrel is finished, the pub simply changes the status of the beer and it disappears from the website.
However, because the same beers may become available for sale again in the future, they store the details of each beer in the website’s database. This means same beer can be quickly published again on the menu, without having to type in the details from scratch. As of autumn 2017, they have almost 800 beers listed in their website database. They’re certainly doing well with their sales!
The same menu system is used for bottled beers, ciders, wine, soft drinks and bar snacks.
For visitors, they click on the menu tabs to open the different categories, which loads with an animation effect:
Other subtle animation effects are included throughout the page. For instance, the navigation menu highlights the current section, which changes as users scroll down the page.
Need a website design for your pub?
We use the world’s number one website software, called WordPress. We can also take care of all the technical side, such as registering domain names, website hosting and maintenance, and setting up email accounts. If you need photography, we can help with this too. So choose Primary Image for your pub’s website design!