The Spotted Dick is a great example of how anyone can manage a WordPress site and the value of managing your own website.

The Spotted Dick had a custom website built a couple of years ago but the site was getting outdated. The specials no longer reflected the offerings in the restaurant and the flash components did not display on mobile devices.

What’s worse, their original design company was no longer responding to their emails. When we approached the Spotted Dick, they had not heard from their design company in a few months despite sending in numerous requests.

While we don’t condone or agree with this attitude, a restaurant website is often considered a small site for many design agencies, and making changes to the site even smaller. Agencies are often happy to take on new web projects but slow to assist with small changes because it’s not as profitable. Plus with so many web companies popping up and disappearing it is common for a small business to loose access to their website all together. This of course is extremely inconvenient for the business. Having an outdated offer on your site could mean having to honor the offer even if it’s no longer beneficial for the business.

Managing your own site is the best way to ensure that you are always able to make changes as needed. And the Spotted Dick is a great example, not only do they now updated their Weekly Specials on their own every week, but their manager is able to do this from a very old computer in their office, and with no prior web experience. During training I even had to show her how to copy and paste because she did not have a computer at home and was not used to using one.

By designing the site with their limitations and requirements in mind, we were able to create a site that easily met their needs without any unnecessary complications.

Their food and drink menus are easy to view online and on mobile devices and accommodate their large list of items with anchor tags that allow viewers to jump to each section quickly.

Their weekly specials as well as their promotions are all posted online and easily updated so they can drive traffic to their location and promote offerings as needed.

And they opted for our basic photo service (photos with a digital SLR camera but no additional lighting equipment) which provided actual shots of the location and food.

Interestingly enough, not even a week after we launched the new site, their old web domain expired. They has asked their old design company to direct the old website to the new address but with no response. It turned out that the site was expiring anyway and the design company had not notified them.