Stonegate have a large number of unique pub business opportunities across the UK. They offer support to help aspiring pub operators to become publicans within their network.
Stonegate had a desire to improve the website where users could search and find a suitable pub that they could apply for to become a publican. With a ready to go solution for managing large amounts of content at scale, we were able to present 24social as the perfect CMS for the job.
The Problems
- The existing website was hosted and powered by a third party system that would no longer be supported by the company.
- A large number of supporting documents had fallen out of date.
- The ability to edit the site was difficult and needed too much intervention from the development team.
- The UI of the website wasn’t up to date and not very mobile friendly.
- The priority of information shown to potential applicants wasn’t in-line with how the company wanted to be portrayed.
The Solution
We started working with Stonegate to understand the key pain points of all user groups from the end user to their internal staff and partners. We interviewed people within the company as well as asked key stakeholders burning questions. This resulted in a huge amount of information being gathered prior to any design work beginning.
Given the new website would be migrated to our 24social platform, this automatically gave Stonegate the benefit of faster page and media loading speeds, higher security, better integration with their core internal systems and an easier content editing experience.
We spent 2 weeks intensively working into the new designs to come up with a new user journey flow that would help users be inspired to find opportunities across the county as well as not be intimidated by numbers associated with running costs.
With a key aim to get more users applying for opportunities across the country, the application process was slimmed down to get users to a stage of speaking to a real person to support them through the rest of their application.
The UI has been updated and ensures responsiveness across all devices and the search mechanics are intuitive and as expected from a modern website solution.
The overall successful improvement of the pub partners website was down to our shared vision, communication and quality of output. As a result, many more applications are being made via the website to the business and the internal team are very please with the output.
