Dammit Jim, it's a pub website; not electoral boundries

Time for a bit of a rant.

We get a lot of feedback on Pubs Galore, and it is all interesting. In the last week we have had a couple that rake over an old issue though, county boundaries.

The site has been through a couple of generations:

1. Initially when it was created the towns and counties were purely maintained as postal counties in the same way as the Post Office did (and still does except that it just ignores counties in favour of postcodes when working out addresses).
2. Later when we set up the maps with counties we cleared it up a bit to try and make it clearer, although still left counties like Avon there (if removed it would mean Bristol getting split between the counties of Bristol, Gloucestershire and Bath & North East Somerset).
3. And the latest generation has the concept of villages in, whereby if you look at a list of pubs on a town page there are pubs shown at the bottom of the list under headings that indicate their 'village', these villages can also be found using the site search.

As well as this it helps to describe a few of the concepts underlying our site. The pages you view do not actually exist until they are viewed at which point they are calculated based on data we have stored. So where a user looks at a pub they are instead looking at a report of the information we store on the pub, with a pub we simply store the town or village it resides in, the pub itself has no county stored with it. At the point you view a pub the county that its town is in is shown.
An example of this is a pub is stored in Keynsham, at the point a user looks at the pub a report is shown that shows it as in Keynsham, the report then also knows that Keynsham is in Bristol, which it knows is in Avon and thus shows those 2 piece of information about the pub through its calculations.

Ok, I have rambled on a bit about how the site works, now to pad that out a bit with the feedback that sparked this. We actually had 2 of the site members mention that Hatfield Heath is actually in Essex not in Hertfordshire, one pointed out that the residents would be highly insulted by this error (so a quick sorry to everyone in Hatfield Heath at this point) and the other said that it was difficult to search for pubs in that area.

Ok so now starts the rant, first of all for us to get the pubs to show the correct county would require slightly deeper changes than simply changing the county of the pub as the pubs do not actually have a county in our system. So to change just this we would need to set it so that the pubs stored a county as well as a town, and then change all pages that show pubs so that the calculations that are done show this stored county rather than the county calculated from this town. Which actually means rewriting about half the site, quite a reworking. Having done that the pubs in Hatfield Heath would at least correctly show Essex (hopefully cheering everyone up in Hatfield Heath, please don't get your hopes up though), but it wouldn't make it any more easy to search for pubs in that area as we would still be showing Hatfield Heath as a village under under the town of Bishops Stortford (in Hertfordshire). So searching for them would still be most effectively done by typing Hatfield Heath in the search box on the left of the site, where they can then choose to look at either our list of pubs in Hatfield Heath or a map of the area of Hatfield Heath (as provided by a Google Maps search) with the pubs on it. It is hard to imagine how to make Hatfield Heath show under Essex, if we were to include all the villages and the towns in the list when looking at counties the site would just get more cluttered (and we believe less usable), if we were to switch Hatfield Heath to be a village in another town it would just confuse as people used to the postal system know to look under Bishops Stortford (and it is after all the nearest town).

The other bit to consider is the Bread Crumb, this is the list of links shown at the top of a page providing a hint of how the site is constructed, so if you look at a pub in Hatfield Heath, the bread crumb is something like Pubs Galore >> England >> Hertfordshire >> Bishop's Stortford >> pub name. If we change the pubs county then the Hertfordshire link should be changed to Essex, what happens when you click on Essex and then can't find a way back to the pub as it is listed under Bishop's Stortford in Hertfordshire?

If anyone can come up with a good clean solution to how to do all this consistently that improves the site from its current design, then I will certainly be keen on changing it, but sadly I don't have the design nonce to improve it from its current design.

Oh and the real ranty bit - well it is the fact that the Pubs Galore site is all about pubs, the towns and counties are just there to try and make the pubs easier to find. Whilst we can spend time trying to improve this, that same time could be spent trying to improve the review system so that members can write more than one review and comment on each others reviews, so that members can just mark a pub as closed or having a different name rather than having to send feedback to us, trying to add more features about the important stuff like real ale! Or we could make sure that we keep the counties in line with the electoral boundaries as each government tries to fiddle together a few extra votes. I think you can guess my priorities ;-)

Please do let me know where I have got any of this wrong, we do read the feedback, or you can comment more publically here or on our forums. The site can definitely be improved, but I think I may need some good ideas off some other people to get there.