The Parogon Group are based in Staffordshire and run a number of outstanding pub restaurants in the surrounding area. The Parogon business style is to carefully select individual and iconic landmarks for their pub venues with the objective of providing high quality restaurants where local and surrounding communities will visit, enjoy and receive exceptional customer service. Simply put, Parogon want to create a dining experience so good that customers are already planning a return visit before they leave.

The group continue to add new venues to their offering, which currently comprises seven venues: The Swan With Two Necks, The Wayfarer, The Orange Tree, Blockhouse at The Sheet Anchor, The Boars Head, The Seven Stars and The Red House.

When we first began working with Parogon, their existing websites had an outdated, rigid look. They lacked modern website capabilities, and had an unreliable booking widget and poor mobile integration generally. Hardly ideal when traffic comes increasingly from mobile devices.

Matt Cheadle, Brand Development Manager at the group, said: “As a business we’re constantly growing, evolving and expanding. Parogon Pubs as an umbrella company didn’t fit with us anymore as we felt it pigeon holed us and didn’t represent the variety of offers and styles we have. For example, the Blockhouse is a smoke house and the Orange Tree is a bar and grill where the others are country style gastro pubs.”

In line with the highly distinctive style and modernity of the Parogon brand, we decided the company deserved a modern website to more accurately reflect the feel of their establishments: Relaxed and welcoming, with a touch of luxury. So we set out to embody that experience in the brand’s website whilst increasing its functionality too.

We completely redesigned the website, transforming it from a stale single page format to an enriched and vibrant site with dedicated pages for careers, latest news and more information about the group and their venues.

We created an ecommerce facility within the websites enabling customers to buy gift cards online and tickets to events, saving them phone calls and visits to the venues, and making transactions easier for customers. We also integrated the new and fully automated booking system which includes being able to cross-sell table availability across all seven of their venues thereby retaining customers within the Parogon Group and increasing table utilisation at their venues.

In addition, we created a centralised careers portal which allowed roles to be filtered by venue. Instead of multiple listings, a single job listing can be created for the same role available in across a number of site i.e. if The Orange Tree and The Wayfarer were both looking for waiters then a single job listing can be created and the desired venue can be chosen during the application process. This also allowed the application to be sent to the correct venue directly.