Website design for The Piltdown Man

The brief

The design brief for this website was to showcase The Piltdown Man as a country pub which offers premium food and service in a family-friendly environment.

While the dining experience was the most important element to present on the website, we also needed to promote their venue hire, members’ club and regular events at the pub.

The solution

Our highest priority in designing this website was to make it easy for people to find the pub contact details and book a table.

It was also important to give the website a classy, highly visual feel – so it looks inviting but also sets the tone for this quality gastropub.

Equally, this premium feel was reflected in the copy we wrote for the website.

Instead of a single page about their venue hire, we recommended separate pages about each function the pub is suitable for – weddings, parties and wakes. This makes it clear to users and to search engines that this is a suitable venue for each one.

We also suggested incorporating pages about the local area. This provides useful information for people travelling to the pub who might want to explore local walks and attractions. Just as importantly, we wanted the website to be highly visible when people search for pubs near those attractions.

Ease of updating the website was also important. We set up the events section so it would be straightforward for the owner to self-publish events, meaning that they weren’t relying on us to do this for them. We provided them with training and support.

The results

The website’s aesthetics reflect the beautiful refurbishment of this landmark pub. The site is easy to navigate and makes it very easy to access their table booking facility.

We’ve been particularly pleased with our pages about the local area, gaining top 3 positions in Google for searches including:

• Pubs near the Bluebell Railway
• Pubs near Glyndebourne
• Pubs near Heaven Farm
• Pubs near Sheffield Park
• Pubs near Piltdown Golf Club

In 2025 these local area pages brought in 982 extra visitors, who otherwise may not have found the pub.

Post launch, we realised that the pub menus needed to be updated much more frequently than we’d anticipated. As a result, we re-structured the menus page to make it very easy for the owner to update the menus as and when they needed.