Case study · Hospitality
A live going-out guide for Chester — menu prices, tonight’s deals and opening hours for more than 150 venues, in one place. Built and maintained by Porkenpence.
Visit the live siteChester has a good midweek offer scene and nowhere to see it. Pubs post a deal to Facebook and never mention it again. Restaurants bury prices three clicks into a menu PDF. Opening hours are wrong on half the aggregators, because nobody who works at the venue has ever been asked.
So the same questions get asked and never properly answered: what does a pint cost round here, what is on tonight, and is it actually open. Every individual venue can answer for itself. Nothing compares them.
More than 150 bars, pubs, restaurants and cafés, each with its own page carrying address, opening hours, menu prices and any deals currently running.
Menu prices captured from real menus and made comparable across venues, so you can sort by what a pint or a plate actually costs rather than guessing.
Happy hours, meal deals and daily specials, filterable by the night you are actually going out — the question people are really asking.
Hours distinguish "closed" from "we do not know", and record where each entry came from, so a bulk refresh can never overwrite something a venue told us directly.
Server-rendered pages with structured data, so venue details are legible to search engines rather than assembled in the browser after the crawler has gone.
Venues, prices and offers live in a database and update without a deploy. Adding a venue is a data change, not a development ticket.
Next.js with server rendering, a DynamoDB store behind it, deployed to our own infrastructure with automated smoke tests over every URL in the sitemap before a release is allowed to stand. Venue, price and offer data is edited through an admin rather than committed, so the site changes without a deploy.
The parts worth calling out are the unglamorous ones. Opening hours carry a record of where each entry came from, ranked by how much it should be trusted — a bulk import from a third party cannot overwrite something the venue told us itself. Prices distinguish a real menu item from an add-on, so “cheapest” means the cheapest thing you can actually order rather than a 50p side of sauce.
Neither is visible on the page. Both are the difference between a directory people trust and one they check once.
Out In Chester is the same work as a hospitality website, done at the scale of a whole city: menus that stay current, opening hours that are right, offers that surface on the night they run, and pages search engines can actually read.
It is also why we understand the ordering problem. If you take orders through a marketplace, you are paying a commission on every one and renting a customer you already had. Our direct ordering platform puts that back on your own site.
We build and maintain sites for Chester businesses — including the ones listed on Out In Chester.