Pub sites

We are always interested to hear what people would like to see on the Pubs Galore site. And even more pleased when we see the site mentioned in a positive light (so please do that more often). We did notice ourselves mentioned in a topic on the CAMRA forums (dubiously under the title 'Bogus pub sites'), in general they have posted us in a positive light which is nice.

Anyway we couldn't resist getting involved, anything for a bit of self promotion. Sadly the topic did take a turn that could potentially turn nasty and rather than carry on with it on the forum there I thought I would reflect on the conversation it prompted between me and Dave here.

Just to be clear early on in this, the Pubs Galore website is on aggregate losing money, the advertising revenue in no way covers the cost of running or developing the site, it is at the moment a work of love rather than profit. We do hope it will make money one day as it feels like it should, but not at the expense of the users enjoyment, that is pointless. Any schemes we have for making money are based on improving the service to publicans, so additional services and a little control over their page (order of the pictures and the like). If done in the right way this could benefit the site as well, if a publican is paying for the service they are pre-incentivised to do things like keep their guest ales up to date.

Anyway, the suggestion in that thread seemed to be that only CAMRA could run an unbiased list of pubs. We don't really see this, CAMRA is about Real Ale not pubs, many pubs are orientated in different directions, as the recent rise of the Gastro pub demonstrates. An easy demonstration of this is munrobasher (the user on the forum making the argument) suggested that his site is run out of love for pubs. Taking a look at his site (http://www.whatpub.org) it restricts listings of pubs that do not sell real ales, hardly unbiased and exactly the same constraints as CAMRA should work under. Having moaned about his model, please do look at his site, it has some nice ideas and is clearly worked on by some people who care about sorting the details.

I think realistically as in most things a commercial web site will hold the advantages as it will have the money to work on and improve its service. There will always be a place for good fan sites though, for the moment we are in that category, and I hope we can continue to appeal to that crowd come what may.

All of which does lead me back to one of our continued questions however, what defines a pub? I am pretty confident it is not constrained by the fact it has to sell real ale, although that does improve a pub. I guess it is somewhere you can go sit in and order an alcoholic drink, sit there and drink it. This opens the door to a lot of restaurants as well however.

Let us know if there is anyway we can improve our coverage of pubs, and indeed if you have a good definition of what a pub is.

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.

New Page Design

If you are reading this you have hopefully seen our new page design on the title page. Please do let us know what you think of it as we are keen to correct it if it isn't right.

For a long time now we have wanted a new design for the page. The previous design (still in use on most of the site) whilst being very pretty and holding a great deal of sentimental value has been reaching its limitations. To go through a couple of them:

As we have added new features we have added new links on the left, when we started the site the links on the left stayed nicely on the screen. Now unless you are running the site at some outrageously large screen resolution then you can never see all the links.

Space, when we started the site we had no real content apart from a seed list of pubs. Now we have over 30,000 pictures, and a growing list of reviews and web links. Where pubs have more than 1 picture as is increasingly happening then the page ends up looking particularly messy especially in lower resolutions. When we started though we had to try and make the pages look interesting even though they had nothing but a name and address on them, consequently now where they have lots of pictures and links to maps they end up looking very busy with the navigation and design getting in the way.

We have made the decision to release the new design in a staged manner, so firstly on the home page. We anticipate the next changes being the Country and County pages. Whilst this is a messy decision, with the site changing appearance dramatically as you use it, it does mean that we can get early feedback off the users so that we can try and make sure the design works better. And also it means that our users can see work in progress on the site, it is going to take a lot of time to get the whole of the new design out and we want our users to know that the site is still alive rather than think we are deserting it as they may do if we don't do any new releases.

I will continue to comment on the new pages as they are released through my blog, please do feel free to leave comments on it so that we can do our best to improve it.

Also just in case anyone is technically minded - The new design uses a template where we constrain the navigation to the top, so as you scroll down the page you should get more detail, whilst still being able to navigate quickly off the page if it is not what you want. Some decisions were made in the design of the page as well, we have not supported Internet Explorer 6, I would think the site will still work in it, but there has been no conscious checking to make sure and in lower resolutions the page will look very odd in IE6. Also we have used some commands that IE doesn't support yet and won't be in the near future. Myself I use the excellent Firefox, as a developer it is invaluable due to some of the add ons that allow me to quickly check my work. I would definitely advise it to anyone, if for no other reason that hopefully if people use it it will give MS the kick up the arse they need to make IE anywhere near as good.