The Red Lyon website redesigned

Posted in Portfolio Pubs on 8 February 2010 | Comments [1]

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:

• The Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator
• Add Meta Tags.

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.

The Holmbush Inn on Horsham Pub Guide

Posted in Pubs Portfolio on 30 October 2008 | Comments

I run a couple of pub guide websites including Horsham Pub Guide. I’ve not had much time to add new pubs to the website in recent months but following a user’s suggestion, I’ve added the Holmbush Inn. OK, that’s the end of this plug.

PS: I’m quite pleased with how the photo turned out but it helps that it was a sunny day…!

Copyright: The photo’s mine. Please don’t use it without permission.

Link checking your website

Posted in Pubs Web development on 22 April 2008 | Comments

I maintain several personal websites including a pub guide and a directory of pub links. In the latter case, it is particularly important to keep up-to-date with invalid links. People are only too happy to submit their link when it is new but if the link becomes invalid, for example the domain name changes or the website goes belly up, I seem to be the last to know.

I have all my links in a database but what I need is a simple link checking tool that can search my web pages for invalid links or do the same thing through my website's admin backend. That's where this LinkChecker extension [home page] for Firefox is very useful. It adds a 'Check Page Links' command to the right click menu. The extension checks each link and highlights every link on the page with a different colour according to their validity [green for valid, red for invalid ... you get the idea].

LinkChecker is a great little tool.

Technorati : firefox

Kings Head in Rudgwick - Horsham Pub Guide

Posted in Portfolio Pubs on 24 July 2007 | Comments

Nice old pub in Rudgwick (between Horsham and Guildford) with Italian-influenced menu.

» Kings Head

Technorati : horsham, inn, pub, rudgwick

Horsham Pub Guide - the Selsey Arms

Posted in Pubs Portfolio on 26 August 2006 | Comments

» Quick link: New pub added on Horsham Pub Guide

The Selsey Arms is a traditional village pub between Horsham and Billingshurst.