The Old Ship
A website and social launch for a village pub reopening after 17 years.
The brief
The Old Ship has been an inn since 1637, and it had been closed for 17 years. When it reopened it had no online presence at all. It needed a website that felt like the village pub people remembered, and a way to tell the whole area it was back.
The website
I designed and built the site around how people actually use a pub's website.
- Call and directions, always in reach. Most people ring to book or just want to find the place, so both buttons stay in the header the whole way down the page.
- No online menu, on purpose. The food comes from a chalkboard that changes daily, so a fixed menu would always be out of date. The site shows an example board and invites people to ring or pop in.
- The practical stuff up front. Dog friendly, walkers and cyclists welcome, garden, step-free access, and clear bar and kitchen hours.
- Photography does the atmosphere. Low beams, the garden and real food, with descriptive alt text on every image.
- Fast and cheap to run. A static site on GitHub Pages with its own domain, so there's nothing for the pub to maintain or pay for beyond the domain.
The launch
I set up the pub's Facebook page on 18 April. In its first two months (to 18 June) it reached 166,528 views, 17,663 engagements and 422 followers, from only about ten posts.
The posts weren't the secret. I manually joined every local community Facebook group and posted the reopening news directly into them. People in a village care about the village pub, and a pub reopening after 17 years is rare news at a time when most are closing. I put it where those people already were instead of waiting for them to find a new page.
None of this was paid for. No ads on Facebook, Google or anywhere else.
Being findable on the map
I also set up the pub's Google Business Profile and Apple Business Connect listing so it shows up on Google Maps, Apple Maps and in local search. Between May and 14 October 2026, the Google profile had 19,408 views and 2,278 interactions (calls, directions and website clicks). 78% of views came from Google Maps on a phone. That's people nearby deciding where to go, which is why the website puts call and directions buttons in the header.
What I took from it
The biggest lever wasn't budget or content, it was distribution. Ten well-placed posts and a properly set up listing did the job without paying for ads.
Next I'd add online table booking and an events calendar.
View the live site →