The problem
The White Swan is a proper drinker's pub. There's no kitchen. It's all about the beer: five regular ales brewed in the yard behind the pub, plus guest ales, craft keg and real cider that change all the time. On Thursdays there's live music, with a different act every week.
That's exactly what makes a pub website hard to keep up. A list of guest ales is out of date the day a barrel runs dry, and a gig list goes stale the week after it's written. The pub's old WordPress site wasn't built for that. Emily, the owner, needed something that showed off the pub properly and that she and her staff could keep current themselves, without ringing anyone or learning a complicated system.
There was a quieter problem too. The pub's Google listing, with hundreds of reviews from happy customers, hadn't been claimed by anyone, so nobody at the pub could manage it.
What I built
A website that feels like the pub. I designed six different looks for Emily to choose from, then built out the one she picked. It covers what's pouring, what's on, the pub's history, opening hours, how to find it and answers to the questions people always ask (yes, dogs are welcome). It puts the pub's own achievements up front: its local CAMRA Pub of the Year award for 2025, Cask Marque, and a place in The Telegraph's Best Pubs in the UK 2026. The key details are written so Google and AI assistants can read them straight away.
A move with no gap. I moved the site to the pub's own web address without it ever going dark. I kept the old site running as a bridge while the switch happened, and I set up redirects so links people had saved to the old pages still work.
Privacy done properly. The map only loads once a visitor agrees to it. Visits are counted without cookies, and anyone can opt out. The privacy and cookie pages explain all of it in plain English.
An app the staff actually use. This is the part I'm proudest of. At /staff, Emily and her team sign in on their phones with a one-off code sent by email, so there's no password to forget. From there they can:
- take a drink off the board when the barrel runs out, or put it back on, with one tap
- add a new guest ale, craft keg or cider, with a preview of exactly how it will look on the website
- add the week's live act, or fix a date or a name
- undo a mistake, or go back to any of the last 20 versions.
I designed it for someone behind a busy bar, using one hand, in about 20 seconds, who has never been trained on it. The buttons are big, the switch simply reads "On the bar" or "Off", and it's easy to read in a dim back bar or in bright daylight by the window. Emily adds her own staff, so she's in control of who can make changes. If the internet ever drops, the website falls back to the last list it saw, so a drinks board is never blank. Gigs disappear on their own once the date has passed.
A visitors screen for the owners. Emily can see in plain English how many people visited the site, which pages they read and where they came from, compared with the week or month before.
How it's going
The new site went live in September 2026 and the switch went smoothly. Emily has claimed the pub's Google listing, with my help, so the pub now manages its own reviews, photos and hours. The web address on the listing points to the new site.
Most importantly, the boards and the gig list are being kept up to date by the pub itself. Emily added her staff to the app within days of launch, and the drinks lists on the website now change as the guest beers do.
In their words
"The sites looking brilliant! Really chuffed with it."
