The Phoenix is a gastropub located in the heart of Chudleigh, South Devon. Tracey and Ian have been running the restaurant for over 10 years and have built the business into a very successful and popular restaurant offering a diverse range of menus that cater to a wide variety of taste preferences. Having dealt with all the challenges that being part of the hospitality service brings with it over the past few years, most noticeably COVID-19, they continue to take immense pride in crafting every meal, ensuring great food is accessible to younger diners, offering affordable options for families to enjoy dining together without straining their budgets. 

Having had a website for several years, Tracey thought it was time for a refresh and to bring it more in-line with the brand they had spent many years growing. The main feature of the site is its ‘booking’ facility. As most business owners know, particularly in the hospitality industry, things can change very quickly, often overnight, therefore, Tracey felt it was important to be able to notify her clients of these changes at very short notice. Tracey wanted us to find a way that allowed her to do this not only via her social media channels, but through the restaurant’s online reservation function. This meant finding and then developing a plug-in that allowed her to close-off times when the restaurant was not open for business. This allowed visitors to clearly see up-to-date availability when booking a table via the website.

Planning and Research: The planning and research phase of the project involved understanding our clients’ goals and identifying what they wanted their website to achieve. In addition, identifying their target audience, conducting competition research, and finally creating a sitemap and a wireframe outlining how the WordPress website would work was considered.

Design: The look and feel of the website were created during this design phase. This included identifying colour schemes, typography, images, and layout design. Photographs were taken of the inside of the restaurant along with the dishes Ian creates in the kitchen. It was felt to be a priority to showcase the food as well as interior shots of the restaurant. Tracey wanted the website to be colourful, using their brand colours, contain lots of photographs of the food and the environment as well as having all the menus easily accessible online for download/viewing.

Development: Once the design had been finalised it was presented to Tracey and Ian as a comprehensive page-by-page wireframe. Once approved our website developers then began the task of building the site in WordPress.

Testing: After development, all our websites undergo testing to ensure functionality across different devices and browsers. This includes checking for bugs, responsiveness, and usability. In the case of The Phoenix, it was also incredibly important to make sure the reservation facility worked correctly, and Tracey was able to change the opening times in the back end of the website without it affecting the front-end.

Deployment: Once these tests were completed and any issues that had been highlighted were resolved, the website was ready for launched. It was uploaded to our servers and made accessible to the public.

Maintenance: Post-launch, all our websites have a varying degree of ongoing maintenance, and this site is no different. To ensure it remains functional and secure, continual monitoring and maintenance takes place regularly, which can involve updating content, fixing bugs, and implementing new security patches as and when needed.