Alight Clients | Sausage Bar
| Re-Branding | Web Site Re-design & Development | Flipping Menu's |
| Search Engine Optimization (SEO) | Content Management System (CMS) |
Sausage bar already had a web site, but when we sat down to chat with one of the owners about some basic SEO, it became clear that they were not happy with the old site's look or performance.
The Sausage Bar is in the far corner of the corner house complex in the Nottingham city centre, right down the street from Nottingham Trent University. Its got funky furniture, excellent music and live DJ's and it also has great food. The Sausage Bar Nottingham is about as funky and bespoke as bars in Nottingham get, with its regular clientele of young professionals and students. The old website was static and grey and didn't do The Sausage Bar justice.
Not too surprisingly after Ben, the manager saw what else Alight had been up to he asked us to re-design the site from scratch. Great, just the type of brief we Love!
The Brief
The site needed to be aimed at students and young professionals, at the same time friendly to families and people who just like good food "like sausages!"
It had to be fun with an interactive element such as a radio or music player.
The client wanted animation but SEO was key, so it couldn't be a full flash site!
It needed to be W3C compliant and disabled user friendly DDA where possible.
The site also needed a Content Management System, allowing the bar to update the site, especially the news and the online gallery easily.
The Results | Brand Development
The sausage bar logo is a pigs snout, in the old site it was barely noticeable. We decided that we had to make a feature of the logo to really push the brand. Alight made the snout animate to fit in with the themes of the pages of the site. For example, on the music page it has rainbow colours and dances and on the menu pages digs his knife and fork into the word sausage.
All of the animations happen when you move the mouse over the snout, an added extra feature to the site, that people seem to really enjoy.
Web Site Re-design & Development
Interaction was a priority, as was Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The site also needed a full CMS system to be easily updated by the client. Anyone who knows about the web will be seeing how technical this site was starting to look, great! We like that too!
We developed the site to be a Hybrid of HTML and Flash. The site is built in HTML but it has flash components which overlay the HTML code, meaning that the site is still search engine friendly and accessible.
The style of the site is brighter and more fun than the old site and more in keeping with the atmosphere at Sausage. The background colour of the site can be changed to match your mood, by clicking the mouse over the choose your mood banner at the bottome left of each page.
MP3 Player | Mood Tunes
At the bottom right you will find the mood tunes button, this launches Sausages very own MP3 player. This sits in it own window and plays funky, trance and break beat tunes.
Tune in here and have a listen to it yourself.
Flipping Menu's!
There is the flipping menu section, a favourite feature of Alight's. This is a virtual book which enables the user to flip the page either automatically by clicking on the top or bottom corner, or manually by clicking on the middle of a page and dragging it across, play around with the one below, it really is funky.
Content Management System | CMS
The whole site is controlled by a fully integrated Content Management System or CMS. This allows Sausage to update any area of the themselves. This means that the sites news, gallery or any page can easily be kept up to date.
All in all a fun and funky site that has the best of flash interaction, whilst being SEO friendly. It is easy to read with a background that can change colour to both suit your mood and make it easier to read for certain eye sight conditions. It has an MP3 player to brighten or match your mood, an online gallery and the whole site is easily updated through the Content Management System.
Search Engine Optimization
Sausage wanted new traffic to deliver bookings and raise the profile of the bar and restaurant. Alight delivered this with knobs on! Read the testimonial below to see just how dramatic that change really was.
Sausage Testimonial
Thank god we came across Alight, they turned our website around, it was a bland run of the mill site, Alight completely redesigned our site to fit the mood and atmosphere of Sausage Bar. The site is now bold and beautiful, easy to use, quirky and fun.
Everybody who visits our site loves it, here are just a few quotes from people who have booked online at Sausage:
"the coolest site I have seen"
"your site really shows off the bar"
"love your site by the way"
Well what more can I say, I love the site, the people using it like it so much as to comment, and my bookings have increased dramatically.
The old grey site got about 10 bookings in the year and a half we had it, since we got the new site and some search engine jiggery from Alight, we get between 5 & 10 big online bookings a week!
Ben Smith
Director and General Manager
Sausage Bar
