The Red Lyon website redesigned
We’ve just launched a new website for the Red Lyon, a pub in Slinfold, which is a small village in West Sussex. It’s one of our local country pubs near Horsham so it was good to get involved with the redesign.
For this project, it was quite important for the website to be updated by the pub landlord so we chose to use WordPress as the content management system and a theme from ThemeForest as the basis for the design. WordPress has traditionally been used as a blog platform but after customisation it’s equally suitable for a brochure-style website with individual pages.
We also wanted to make sure that the website is effectively indexed by search engines and that a Google sitemap is automatically generated when the website is updated. There are many plug-ins for Wordpress which enable you to tweak the core functions and these are the search engine-related WordPress plug-ins we used for this project:
We also modified the page titles using a custom field and several other plug-ins were used, in part to give more flexibility with the page sidebar if we choose. WordPress is a very good website content management system but it usually requires customisation to get the best from it (in my opinion).
We hope to be doing more with the website over the next few months.
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Stephen Webb 9 February 2010, 10:04 1
This is a very nice site design, and the choice of Wordpress for a content management system is certainly a good one. Having created a few sites using Wordpress myself, I am starting to realise how flexible it is. The open source nature of the software allows you to freely edit everything, and the vast range of plug-ins make it extremely adaptable.
Design-wise I particularly like the usage of drop shadows on borders, and the textures that have been incorporated into the design background, which really help to break the page up into sections. The photos are especially vibrant sitting on the beige and white background, adding a central focus point to each page.
I would be very interested to see further Wordpress designs, as this is a powerful platform that can be highly customised, so it is well worth researching what can be done with it.