Site of the Month: Gordon Ramsay

This month’s “Site of the month” was developed for British chef and restaurateur, Gordon Ramsay, by SilverStripe Partner, Positive Technology—the web development agency behind some of the UK’s leading brands.

Positive have been working with Gordon Ramsay Group for over nearly two years. Initially, the agency inherited a site on another CMS platform that was not delivering in terms of user experience and maintainability. Therefore, the re-build of the group’s presence aimed to create a visually stunning website, which clearly represented the differing restaurants throughout the world and engaged with Gordon’s personality and charitable work.

The core strategy developed by Positive’s in-house team was to segment Gordon personality site away from the restaurants’. In the previous site, the two sides of the business were muddled with an indistinct boundary between them, which confused site users. Alongside this, each restaurant had an existing visual identity needed to be brought into the site and Positive’s design team worked exceptionally hard to reflect the look-and-feel within the new development.

Development of the multi-restaurant site

The brief to the design and development team was to create a responsive multi-theme website, with each of the core 12 restaurants having their own look-and-feel, a shared shop and the ability to integrate with the OpenTable API to facilitate bookings. The restaurant group also required a central hub site to guide the user to the restaurant of their choice (gordonramsayrestaurants.com), plus the creation of a distinct site for Gordon himself (gordonramsay.com).

Gordon Ramsay restaurants’ site

Gordon Ramsay personality site

A common approach to content management was built, allowing the content administrators to seamlessly manage 14 different websites. Content authors are allowed to create content blocks of all the functionality on the site, and able to drag and drop components within the page in the SilverStripe CMS.

Leveraging existing modules

To deliver the site, Positive leveraged several existing modules:

• Subsites Module: they made extensive use of the “themes” and the Subsite Module to create a distinct look-and-feel for each site and to allow for the clear separation of sites per domain.
• LESS Module: the site made extensive use of the LESS module to manage the many CSS styles within the multitude of themes across the various responsive viewports.
• Twitter Feed: as social media is a central part of the strategy, the Twitter Feed widget was utilised.
• Burnbright Silvershop: they made use of the Burnbright shop to provide e-commerce and catalogue functionality. They adapted the module to allow for the purchase of gift vouchers on the site.

Results

The sites continue to grow and evolve. For instance, the integration of Stackla to enhance the social aspect of the site are keeping the site fresh for visitors; and the growth of the restaurant group are demonstrating the power of the CMS to constantly deliver an ever-growing content tree.

The Black Friday/Cyber Monday events have shown the capability of the site, in combination with various marketing tactics, to deliver sales growth for the group. Between 2014 and 2015, the number of vouchers sold rose by 5,000%, with the Silvershop module and the site generally providing robust under intense traffic peaks.

The Gordon Ramsay personality site has seen some impressive numbers: daily traffic has increased by around 280% since launch and has peaked at over 21,000 sessions per day. Over the past 6 months, there have been around 2 million page views. Mobile traffic has accounted for around 58% of sessions on the site in the same period, showing the value of a truly mobile optimised experience.

Get your own work showcased!

You can see Positive’s full work showcased on the SilverStripe developer directory. To upload your own work, head to our community showcase.