Beer Festivals

I have been quiet on my blog for a while now, part of this is because we have not done much with Pubs Galore. Although in the time I wasn't updating my blog we did release one big feature, listing beer festivals.

The beer festival listings were suggested by one of the sites regular contributor's. It was something we had toyed with before but it kept getting sidelined, once it was requested though, we thought we should do it (and it still took us about 10 months to get it done sadly).

As is usual with our features we didn't realise how popular it would be, it has turned out to be very popular and seems to be attracting new traffic into the site. Since we released it we have seen some of the things we did wrong in setting it up:

The festival address system is a bit too strict. We are relying on Google maps to match the address, and if it can't then we reject the address. This was partly deliberate, where pubs are submitted a few of them have pretty bad addresses that we need to check. Also the way we store pub addresses is tailored for the UK, so for the festivals we are storing them a little differently now with the Google match allowing us to keep the addresses more standardised, if we can get it working then it will make it a lot easier for us to add pubs from other countries. Anyway, we need to find a way to relax the addresses so that users find the system easier to use.

When the festival is submitted it is not clear that it is waiting for an administrator to check it before it appears as a listing, this was a silly mistake and we will have to correct it when we get the time.

Other than that I would like to find ways to improve the festivals. At the moment it is very much about upcoming festivals. It would be nice if we could show the festivals still when they are over and allow members to review and post pictures, then we could show the previous years festival if it is an annual event.

As ever let us know if there are ways we can improve the festivals or any other bits of the site.