Website Redesign and Tidy Up. 

The Hairy Bar Snacks website has been a bit of a sprawling mess for a few years now. I simply didn’t have the time to make things the way I wanted them. The old site was built by me, by hand, a very long time ago and it worked fine, for ages, but things change.

Technical boring bit: the old site was coded in HTML the server running PHP 5.4 with a MySQL database. I really needed to update the version of PHP for lots of reasons, but the problem was that if I updated the version of PHP then the site broke. I didn’t have time to re-code the site, so I partially rebuilt it in WordPress, at first, moving a few easy pages. I left the reviews pages as links back to the old site which was not ideal, but necessary at that time, due to the sheer number of the damn things.

Then, a few weeks ago, I decided that it was time to bite the bullet as WordPress was going to stop working on PHP 5.4. So, I copied the site to a temporary domain name, then found a nice free theme and then manually copied the 100s of pork scratching and pub reviews from the old site, but this time making sure that everything I did would be good for the future.

I also added a reviewer plugin to the site so I could show all of the reviews in a better way. This plugin allows you to add your own review to any of the scratchings or pubs on the site, so go on, dive in! Search for a brand you have tried and write a review.

So, the next thing on my list is to transcribe the 100s of pork scratching reviews that I didn’t have time to add to the old site. These are all written on paper, in a box in my office. This is going to take a while, but you should see them appear on the site every now and then, when I get 5 minutes.