The English Manner
Website

Introduction

This is William Hanson’s website for his etiquette and protocol training business, ‘The English Manner’. I have worked with William since January 2023 when we started the website redesign project. Since then I have provided ongoing WordPress maintenance, and also expanded the site with new features which William has requested.

About the website

The site uses a bespoke WordPress theme, with pages created from modular content blocks providing a range of pre-styled components. The benefit of this for my client and his team is that the editing experience is simple, and the end result alway remains on-brand even with the least technical knowledge.

It was important to clearly set out the range of courses and delivery methods available, with a clear navigation and intuitive user-experience. Functionality for booking courses online wasn’t required as this is managed on a different platform. The course pages show detailed information about the course and the tutors, along with dates, times, and costs. This information feeds into a course calendar page, which makes it easy for potential clients to easily see what courses are coming up and follow a link to make a booking.

Additional fields have been added to the standard WordPress user profiles in order to create tutor profiles. These profiles are attached to courses and articles on the site which makes it easy for the viewer to see the wealth of expertise available.

Date
Link

About the client

The English Manner are the UK’s leading etiquette and protocol institute offering training sessions and courses, seminars and presentations across the world, working with royal and diplomatic households, leading corporations and businesses, schools, universities and individual clients.
Find out more

The English Manner

Explore the services used

Web Design

Web Development

WordPress CMS

E-commerce

Find out about Web Design

Website Care & Maintenance Plan

Find out about Web Support

Working with Jeremy was a delight from start to finish.  From the initial enquiry call to the launch and post-launch activities around our shiny new website, Jeremy's talents and ease of manner made what can often be a stressful time practically perfect in every way.

William Hanson

Executive Director

The English Manner

Nothing was ever a problem, and Jeremy reacted and actioned all queries and tweaks with poise and alacrity.  We did not miss our launch deadline - if anything, I am confident we managed to launch sooner than we thought.

William Hanson

Executive Director

The English Manner

So much tech know-how is needed to make a website function properly.  While many off-the-shelf products are available for a cost-effective price, what you save in money, you lose in website performance and speed - key factors for your search rankings.  Going for one of those well-marketed products is a false economy, and I am glad we saw the light and hired Jeremy.

William Hanson

Executive Director

The English Manner

Jeremy was able to explain the more complicated parts of web design and function in clear, understandable terms and has set up the back-end of the site to be very user-friendly, intuitive and clear to edit and manage.  

I cannot recommend or thank Jeremy enough.

William Hanson

Executive Director

The English Manner

Project features

Graphic
Design

Always bespoke
designs

Website
Design

Professional
Web Design

Responsive
Web Design

Mobile-first
Responsive layout

What is Responsive Web Design?

WordPress
CMS

The open-source
platform

What is WordPress?

Website
Development

Custom jQuery
development

Website
Development

Custom PHP
development

The challenge

My client William Hanson approached me because he was unhappy with the design of his website: The English Manner – his etiquette and protocol training business. The website had only relatively recently been completed by another web designer, but he was very disappointed with the design and finesse of the site.

This made it absolutely essential that the redesign was both efficient in terms of cost, and effective in terms of outcome.

Design

William wanted his website to effectively convey the expertise available to new and returning clients, along with easy access to the wide range of training courses available. The new website needed to reflect the same high quality as their courses, and demonstrate the excellent manners taught to their clients.

The business already had brand guidelines that the new website would need to adhere to including a logo, patterns, and range of primary and secondary colours.  William was open, however, to new ideas and ways to enhance the design.

I took some time to carefully consider how the guidelines could be stretched, within reason.  It was possible to apply them in a creative rather than prescriptive way to give a contemporary and stylish look to the redesigned website, whilst still feeling very much part of The English Manner brand.

SEO

An experienced SEO consultant assisted with the planning of the new site, ensuring that a fully optimised site map was developed, along with extensive keyword research to ensure the best possible organic search performance. This research informed the design of the new site, ensuring a data-backed approach rather than the personal opinion and ‘finger’s crossed’ approach of many web designers.

Ranking at first position on the front page of Google for the term ‘Etiquette training’ and with other terms performing equally as well, the new site demonstrates why it is important to consider SEO in web design, from the very beginning of the project.

Outcome

The site has been a hit with William and The English Manner’s internal teams.  Feedback from clients has been very positive, too.  The project ran smoothly, and was delivered on-time thanks to William’s organised, proactive and responsive manner.  He was a pleasure to work with.

Course Calendar

The Course Calendar page gives the viewer the ability to search, filter or sort the courses to help them find what they're looking for. Jquery and CSS was used to provide client-side sorting and filtering

Courses

The courses on the website are organised by categories. This makes it much easier for the user to locate courses of interest to them. On the category pages there is some introductory text and a list of all courses available in that category

Insights

To showcase The English Manner's knowledge in their area of expertise we created a blog, called Etiquette Insights. All the articles are shown in date order on a listing page, and this list of articles can be further refined by category or author to help the user find content of interest to them.

Colour palette

#311638

49, 22, 56

#f5ddca

245, 221, 202

#fefcee

254, 252, 238

#807a8a

128, 122, 138

#ffffff

255, 255, 255

Typography

Lora

Google Fonts

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

Website preview

The English Manner (Website simulation on a laptop)
The English Manner (Website simulation on a tablet)
The English Manner (Website simulation on a smartphone)

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