Black Horse Inn Website Rebuild, Donington on Bain

28 Pixels rebuilt the website for the Black Horse Inn, a family-run pub in Donington on Bain near Louth opens in a new tab, turning a single overcrowded page into a full multi-page site covering food, accommodation, local events and the Lincolnshire Wolds. The rebuild focused on clear, factual content that Google, Bing and other search tools (including LLMs like ChatGPT) can use to answer real questions about the pub, from accommodation and dog policy to nearby attractions like Cadwell Park.

---

Some website projects are simply jobs. Others are exactly the sort of work I enjoy doing.

The Black Horse Inn at Donington on Bain, near Louth, falls very firmly into the second category.

It’s a traditional family-run country pub in the Lincolnshire Wolds, with good food, accommodation, local ales and owners who genuinely care about the place. The problem was that its website didn’t do a particularly good job of showing any of that.

It needed more than a prettier design.

It needed a website that actually represented the business.

The problem with the old Black Horse Inn website

The existing website was basically a one-page site trying to do too much in too little space.

The Black Horse isn’t just somewhere to pop in for a pint. There’s the restaurant and regularly changing food, accommodation, local events, walking and cycling, it’s close to Cadwell Park opens in a new tab, and there’s the Lincolnshire Wolds on the doorstep.

Trying to squeeze all that into one page meant information was difficult to find, important parts of the business weren’t getting the attention they deserved and there wasn’t much scope for building useful search visibility around the different reasons people might be looking for the pub.

So the first job was working out what the website needed to become, not simply redesigning it.

Turning one page into a useful website

I rebuilt the site around a full multi-page structure.

That allowed different parts of the Black Horse to have their own space rather than everything competing for attention on one long page.

Food and drink finally had room to be explained well. Accommodation had its own space for people looking for somewhere to stay. Practical information about the pub, its facilities and location became easy to find, and content about the surrounding area could help people planning a visit to the Lincolnshire Wolds.

That structure also gave search engines and AI search systems much clearer information about what the Black Horse offers and where it fits geographically. That’s increasingly important.

Someone might search for a country pub near Louth, accommodation near Cadwell Park, somewhere to eat while walking the Viking Way, a dog-friendly pub in the Lincolnshire Wolds or somewhere to stay before visiting Market Rasen.

Those aren’t all the same search.

A website needs enough depth and structure to answer all of them.

Writing website content for people first

A lot of my work on the project has been writing content.

That means turning what Adam and Victoria actually offer into useful information somebody can understand before they arrive, not filling pages just to have words on them.

Small business websites often suffer from one of two problems; There’s hardly any useful information, or somebody has filled them with generic SEO fluff that could describe almost any business in the country.

Neither helps much.

The Black Horse Inn already had the things worth talking about.

It’s an 18th-century pub in Donington on Bain, with Adam as a classically trained chef serving freshly prepared food and local ales. There are rooms for people staying in the area, Cadwell Park is close by, and walkers, cyclists, families and dogs are all welcome in the right parts of the pub. There’s ample parking too, and the Lincolnshire Wolds are quite literally outside the door.

My job was to make those things easier to find and understand.

Using what customers already say about the business

One of the advantages of working with a long-established local business is that you don’t have to invent reasons why people should visit.

The customers have usually already told you.

Reviews of the Black Horse repeatedly mention the food, friendly staff, comfortable rooms, welcoming atmosphere, local ales and its usefulness for people visiting Cadwell Park or exploring the Wolds.

That’s evidence of what people actually value about the business, better than any marketing fluff I could write myself.

Those themes can then influence what deserves prominence on the website and what prospective customers are likely to want answered.

Building for Google and AI search

Search optimisation has been part of the rebuild rather than something bolted on afterwards.

That includes the obvious technical and on-page SEO work, but I’ve also been developing the site with newer forms of search in mind.

Google is increasingly trying to answer questions directly. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and other AI systems are doing the same thing.

That changes the way useful local business content needs to be written. Pages need clear factual information, and questions need straightforward answers. Locations and services need to be unambiguous, and important information shouldn’t hide behind vague marketing language.

So I’ve been developing content around the real questions somebody might ask before visiting or booking.

• Where is the Black Horse Inn?
• How far is it from Cadwell Park?
• Does it have accommodation?
• Can I bring my dog?
• Is there parking?
• Is it suitable for walkers or cyclists?
• Can I eat there without staying?
• What is there to do nearby?

Those questions might look simple, but collectively they help build a much clearer understanding of the business for customers, Google and AI search systems.

The website isn’t the whole job

One of the things I enjoy about working with small local businesses is that the work rarely fits neatly into a box marked “website”.

The Black Horse project hasn’t stopped at rebuilding some pages and handing over the keys.

I’ve continued helping with the wider online presence, including their Google Business Profile, search visibility, content and new areas of the business as they develop.

That’s how I prefer these relationships to work.

A website shouldn’t be something that gets rebuilt every five years and largely forgotten in between. Businesses change. Google changes. Search behaviour changes. New opportunities appear. The website should change with them.

Adding new opportunities rather than starting again

A good example has been the development of additional accommodation at the Black Horse.

Rather than needing another website or trying to squeeze something new into an old structure, the existing site can simply be expanded.

New accommodation can have its own content, photography, booking information, search optimisation and supporting pages.

That’s one of the benefits of getting the foundations right in the first place.

The website becomes something the business can build on.

A website the owners are proud of

The most important result for me is fairly simple.

Adam and Victoria are extremely happy with what the website has become.

I’m pleased with that, obviously, but here’s why.

The objective was never to turn the Black Horse into some slick corporate hospitality brand. That would completely miss the point.

It’s a traditional family-run pub in a Lincolnshire village. People like it because of the welcome, the food, the atmosphere and the people running it.

The website needed to feel like it belonged to that business while still doing all the rather less romantic things a modern website has to do behind the scenes. It needed to help people find the pub, understand what’s on offer and get their questions answered. It needed to encourage bookings, support Google visibility and give search engines useful information. And increasingly, it needed to give AI systems enough reliable information to recommend the business when it’s relevant.

Why I like projects like this

I work with websites, search optimisation, content and AI, but this sort of project is really why I enjoy doing it.

It’s a small local business. There isn’t a marketing department, a branding committee and three layers of people discussing whether a button should say “Book” or “Book Now”. There are real people running a real business, serving customers, cooking food, cleaning rooms, pulling pints and trying to make the place work.

Technology should help them do that. That’s the bit that interests me.

Take something that isn’t doing the business justice, work out what’s wrong with it, improve it, then keep helping as the business develops.

The Black Horse Inn now has a website that is considerably more useful to customers, gives Google and AI search systems far more to work with and, most importantly, better reflects the pub that Adam, Victoria and their team have built.

And the work isn’t really finished.

That’s rather the point.

Practical questions before visiting the Black Horse Inn, Donington on Bain