Shackology

Shackology is a brand new café/bar/restaurant that opened in April (2007) on Chiswick High road in west London.

It's never too early to start

The first version of the Shackology website was launched at the beginning of 2005. At that point, the business was at the concept stage, so the website was used primarily as a Document Management System - password-protected, of course!

The new website is very much public-facing, and one of our key challenges will be to bring traffic to the website. This will take time and effort, but we do have a headstart: the search engines know that "http://www.shackology.com" has been live continuously for two years and they (the search engines) will give extra credit as a result.

The website as an aid to recruitment

It isn't exactly a cafe, it isn't quite a bar... and it isn't a pub either. So recruiting the right people was going to be a challenge.

Vacancies were posted online and driven back though the website. It was here that the website proved its worth by helping people decide whether this would be the right place for them. (Remember, ShackoIogy was an emply shell of a building at that point.) An unusually high proportion of applicants were invited for interview... and an unusually high number were offered a position.

The website as an aid to trial-ing

Once the building began to take shape, the website address was pinned to the window. Visitors to the site (a) found a beautiful website waiting for them(!) and (b) were invited to leave their email address.

At the appropriate point, these "subscribers" were emailed an invited to "book a slot". The take up was in excess of 50% - seems that people like the idea of a "free lunch" !

The website as an aid to Restaurant Bookings

We're currently (July 2007) running a series of experiments to see if it makes sense to take restaurant bookings online. We're targeting both earned ("organic") and paid for (Adwords) traffic.

For the earned traffic, the key was to create a page specifically targeted at restaurants in Chiswick.

For the paid for traffic, a specific landing page has been created. Again, it's specifically targeted at eating out in Chiswick.

Visit the Shackologywebsite.