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Case study

The Malcolm Arms

The Malcolm Arms website shown in a browser window: the pub’s name over a photograph of fish, chips and mushy peas.

100

accessibility score on mobile

6

pages rebuilt on a custom theme

The brief

Project objectives

  • Be the obvious choice for somebody searching nearby for food
  • Give the caravan park its own presence rather than a footnote
  • Get the pages loading quickly on a rural mobile signal
  • Make the site usable for everyone, on any device

What I did

A pub and restaurant at Anton’s Gowt near Boston, with a caravan park alongside it. Country pubs live or die on being found by people who are already nearby and already hungry, which makes this a local search problem as much as a design one.

Alongside the build I went through the site properly: headings and meta descriptions across every page, canonical tags, social sharing markup and structured data so search engines understand what kind of business this is. Then performance — caching, minification, deferred scripts, lazy loading, and the fonts moved off an external service to be served from the site itself.

The work is ongoing. Accessibility is the current focus: colour contrast, link styling, touch target sizes and proper page landmarks, because a good number of the people looking this place up are doing it one-handed on a phone.

Fancy being the next one?

Tell me what you do and what the current site is not doing for you. I will come back with what I would build and roughly what it would cost.