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).