New look website for The Artisan Food Trail

The Artisan Food Trail originally launched in March 2011 and since then has grown considerably as new members have joined and the digital world has moved forward.

Wanting to offer a better user experience for website visitors as well our members and to make the website responsive keeping up with current technologies, we have given it a complete overhaul.

A cleaner page layout with large images along with functional information panels helps to better showcase each food and drink producer featured on
the site.
Comprehensive menus and content give detailed information on the services offered by The Artisan Food Trail and the recipe section, again, with bigger images, serves to inspire and inform.

We have also included an online application form for prospective members which will make things a lot simpler all round.

The website was designed and built by husband and wife team Graham and Lisa Childs, – both the founders of The Artisan Food Trail and owners of the design company, childsdesign.

We admit it has taken a long time to finally get the website completed and there are still some tweaks to be done and new content to be added.
Building a website from the ground up is a lengthy process (especially one as big as ours) and it's surprising how much more you learn when doing something like this.

We are still in the process of building the members' area and when fully functioning it will allow new members to pay for their subscriptions online and existing members can renew in the same way while getting access to exclusive content, amongst other things.

If you have already seen the new website you may have noticed that we have a shop coming soon. We're very excited about this as visitors will finally be able to buy artisan food and drink direct from our members.

Got a spare moment?
Have a look around our new website www.artisanfoodtrail.co.uk

Brand new website launches for Alan Coxon’s Historic Food Range

Buying Alan Coxon’s historic food range has become easier since the launch of a dedicated website foodbyalancoxon.com.

A few months ago, Alan Coxon got in touch with us at The Artisan Food Trail to ask whether we’d be able to create a website for him which would allow him to sell his products more effectively.

Visitors to our website will notice that we have various offerings to assist our members, one of those being website services. The Artisan Food Trail works with experts to ensure that it can achieve the best results according to budget and this is where Building Websites For Business comes in.

Consisting of three key people, one of whom is Graham Childs who is not only joint founder of The Artisan Food Trail but also a director and the design/creative member of the team. He is responsible for the look of the website, creating a strong brand identity. Steve Ramsey handles the technical side, making sure the website is set up to be found easily on the web and is Google friendly (it’s a lot more complicated than we make it sound!) Dawn Mimnagh is the copywriter. Her role is to create readable, grammatically correct text that is accurate as well as interesting and informative.

But enough about the behind the scenes stuff, the best part is that the foodbyalancoxon.com website is live, it’s looking good and ready to take orders. Each product is proudly displayed on the front page; Ale-Gar©®, Ancient Greek Vinaigre©®, Roman Vinaigre©® and Macadamia Nut Oil with a click-through to ‘buy now’ or you can go to the shop area.

For some culinary insight, Alan Coxon, shares some of his recipes, using the historic food range, in a special section which gives you plenty of ideas on how to use them. Overall, the look of the website is modern with a traditional twist, echoing the roots of inspiration behind Alan Coxon’s historic food range.

foodbyalancoxon.com
Bringing a taste of the past to the kitchens of the present.

We've won an award!: The Artisan Food Trail is 'Highly Commended' for Internet Marketing

Graham Childs (left) and Lisa Childs (centre)

Last night we achieved our first milestone and we're very excited about it too.
Although The Artisan Food Trail has only been around for just four months, we have been recognised by being awarded a 'Highly Commended' Internet Marketing Award for 2011. As the award title suggests, we were not only judged on our website, but for all of our marketing activity and promotion online – website, blog, email campaign, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the numerous other places you'll find, see or know about us.

From what started as a passion for real food from real people and a humble food blog, we've amazed ourselves in what we've been able to achieve in those four months and we thank everyone that's supported us so far.
The food producers who are part of the trail form the symbiotic relationship that holds together, what is becoming a strong online community, helping us to help others.

We obviously intend to build The Artisan Food Trail further, so who knows what awards we may be winning in the future.

www.artisanfoodtrail.co.uk

Our Approval

Those of you who are regular visitors to our website will have noticed that some of our artisan food producers display our Artisan Food Trail Approved badge. This badge is our little award that we give to those producers whose products we've properly tried.
We may be biased but we can highly recommend all our producers' products on our website and that's why they are there.

So you're a an artisan food producer and you want to become
'Artisan Food Trail Approved'?
If you're already on the food trail all you need to do is send some samples for us to try and test in our kitchen. Just drop us an email and we'll give you details of where to send them to. Any recipes we create or any of yours we try, we'll publish on the blog.

If you're not on the trail, you might want to consider joining. For a reasonable subscription fee you'll get your own page on our website, plus we'll promote you via our newsletter, social media and this blog of course.
Simple but very effective.

Our Website Goes Live!

Finally, we have launched our website. It has been a long, but enjoyable process and at last we can show ourselves to the world!
The Artisan Food Trail directory is more than just a directory, as our aim is to promote our listed producers as much as possible using social media, word of mouth etc, but always direct people back to the website.

As you'll see, when you have a look around the website, we are able to offer a wide variety of other services to help artisan food producers to promote their business.



Over the coming months we hope to continue to expand the directory with more producers making this a very exciting project indeed.

www.artisanfoodtrail.co.uk

Take a sneaky peek at our forthcoming website

Building a website can take a long time, not just the techie stuff, but the planning and decision making about how it should be, can take a very long time.

You have an idea and you sort of know what you want the end result to be, but the bits in between are so, so important. Just establishing what food categories we wanted was more difficult than we'd anticipated.
It's amazing how the things that you think would be very obvious, suddenly take much more thought.
What we did learn, was that a plan is required and it has to be stuck to.

Our website is a directory that allows people to use a search to find their favourite producers or simply their food of choice. They can be as particular as they like or they can just browse around the categories discovering producers.

We wanted the producers to have their own pages on our site, an individual page, so that they are separated out of a list. We have The Artisan Food Trail template that applies to all producers – this is to create uniformity and user-friendliness – but each producer page can be colour matched to their own identities.

We have already had a lot of interest from producers, wanting to become part of The Artisan Food Trail, and we hope the website will continue to grow.

Not long now, until our full website is live and on the internet for all.
In the meantime you can sign up to our newsletter to keep up-to-date.

www.artisanfoodtrail.co.uk