The Bell Inn, Kersey_

About the project

The Bell Inn is a 14th-century village inn in the heart of Kersey — one of Suffolk’s most photographed heritage villages, best known for its watersplash and the tight cluster of medieval buildings sitting either side of it. The pub itself has been serving Kersey for centuries; the building predates most of what surrounds it. Under new tenancy in 2026, the Bell needed a website that matched the ambitions of the fresh team taking it on.

The brief was clear: honour what the building already is (14th-century, atmospheric, warm, historic) while giving the new tenants a website that works commercially in ways the old one didn’t. Better table bookings, a proper events programme (the Bell hosts music nights, seasonal gatherings, private hires and village events year-round), and the ability for the team to keep everything current without needing to call us every time the menu changes or an event is added.

We were brought in to deliver the full package: a bespoke brand identity for the digital space, a custom WordPress theme built from scratch, and a piece of custom WordPress functionality specifically for the events programme — more on that shortly.

The challenge

Three things made this project genuinely tricky.

First, the heritage-vs-modern problem. The Bell’s biggest asset is that it looks and feels 14th-century — beamed ceilings, brick fireplaces, uneven floors, all of it. But the website couldn’t look 14th-century itself — that’s the classic country-pub site trap, all faux-medieval typography and Ye Olde parchment textures that end up looking naff rather than authentic. The site needed to feel warm and rooted without leaning on cliches, letting the photography of the actual building do the heritage work.

Second, the events programme problem. Village inns like the Bell live and die by their events. Music nights, quiz nights, seasonal menus, valentine’s dinners, mother’s day sittings, the summer beer garden programme, private hires for weddings and wakes. Each one has its own poster or graphic. Each one needs to appear on the site, promote itself in the run-up, and quietly disappear once it’s over so the events page always shows what’s upcoming rather than a graveyard of past dates.

Third, the hand-off problem. New tenants running a busy pub don’t have time to learn a complicated CMS. Whatever we built needed to make adding an event as simple as uploading the graphic the printer supplied for the physical poster, setting the date, and hitting publish. Anything more complex than that would result in a site that stopped being updated within weeks.

Our approach

We led with photography. The hero of the homepage is a wide, warm shot of the Bell’s dining room — beams, brick fireplace, the distinctive blue-and-yellow upholstered chairs, tables set for service. It says everything the site needs to say about the pub in one image, without a word of copy. Below the hero, elegant serif display typography (a classical Roman-style face, warm rather than austere) sits against a warm, rich palette drawn from the pub’s own interior — deep browns and ambers, softened cream neutrals, all evocative of a room lit at dusk. Modern, but distinctly not clinical.

For the WordPress theme itself, we hand-coded from scratch rather than starting from a template or page builder. That decision came down to two things: performance (a hospitality site loads on mobile in someone’s garden or on the drive down to Kersey, often on patchy signal) and long-term maintainability (page builders accumulate bloat and break with WordPress core updates; hand-coded themes stay predictable for years). No page builder, no plugin Frankenstein, just clean bespoke code sitting on top of WordPress’s standard editing experience.

The custom events functionality was the quiet centrepiece of the build. Rather than bolting on a generic events plugin (which typically produces ugly, template-y event pages that don’t match the site’s aesthetic), we built a bespoke WordPress event type designed around how the Bell’s team actually works. Each event has just three fields the team really need to touch: an uploaded graphic (the same poster artwork used for physical flyers and social media), a date, and a short description. That’s it.

The clever part is what happens on the front-end. Events automatically appear on the Events page ordered by date. Once an event’s date has passed, it drops off the public listing automatically — no manual clean-up needed. Upcoming events surface on the homepage as promotional callouts, again automatically. That means the team never has to touch the site to clean up expired content — they just add new events as they’re confirmed, and the site handles the rest.

What we delivered

• Bespoke brand identity for the digital space — warm palette drawn from the pub’s interior, classical serif display type, editorial rhythm and image treatment guidelines
• Custom-coded WordPress theme — hand-built from scratch, no page builder, no premium theme, no plugin Frankenstein
• Full-bleed atmospheric hero photography — the pub’s own dining room doing the credibility work in seconds
• Bespoke WordPress event functionality — custom post type with graphic upload, date field, and auto-managed lifecycle (upcoming events surface automatically; expired events drop off automatically)
• Homepage event promotion — upcoming events surface directly on the homepage as promotional callouts without any manual work from the team
• Dedicated Menus section for the pub’s current menus, updated by the team as they change with seasons
• Gallery section for building and interior photography that lets visitors get a real feel for the pub before they arrive
• Book a Table integration — low-friction table booking flow prominent in the header and repeated at key conversion points
• Contact and location detail optimised for people planning a visit to Kersey — opening hours, directions, parking, everything a first-time visitor asks
• Content workflow designed for a busy hospitality team — adding a new event takes under a minute, updating a menu takes two, no technical knowledge required
• Mobile-first responsive build — engineered for phones first, because almost all pub-website traffic is mobile
• Fast Core Web Vitals — hand-coded means fast loads even on rural mobile signal
• UK-hosted infrastructure — SSL, automated backups, GDPR-compliant booking and contact handling
• SEO foundations — local schema, geo-targeting for Kersey, Hadleigh and surrounding villages, structured for “pub Kersey”, “Sunday lunch Suffolk” and related hospitality intent searches

Why it works

Most village-pub websites make the same mistakes. They either lean far too hard into the “historic” aesthetic (parchment textures, medieval typography, gothic borders) which reads as dated rather than heritage, or they use whatever pub-specific WordPress theme happens to be top of the marketplace that year, which produces a site that looks identical to every other pub within twenty miles. Neither approach earns the trust of a first-time visitor trying to work out whether the food is any good and whether the atmosphere matches what the pub’s own photos promise.

The Bell Inn site avoids both traps by trusting the pub’s own real assets to do the work. The heritage credibility comes from the actual photographs of the actual 14th-century building, not from typography choices dressed up to look old. The commercial rigour comes from a considered book-a-table flow, a proper events programme that stays current on its own, and a WordPress admin the team can actually use.

The custom event system is the quiet win. Almost every village pub we’ve looked at has an events page that’s either months out of date (because updating a generic events plugin is a chore) or nearly empty (because the team gave up on it). The Bell’s events page always shows what’s coming up, because keeping it that way requires zero maintenance beyond adding events as they’re confirmed. That’s the difference between a events programme that promotes itself and one that’s just there in theory.

Could we build your next site?

Jabu Designs is a website design, software development, and design and print agency based in Bury St Edmunds. We work with pubs, restaurants, village inns and hospitality venues across Suffolk and the wider UK on bespoke builds like this one. Alongside website design and custom WordPress themes, we offer brand identity, bespoke software, and SEO — a genuine one-stop digital partner for hospitality businesses that want their site to feel as considered as their service.

Pub or restaurant looking for a website? See more of our pub and restaurant website work — we’ve built sites for hospitality venues across Suffolk and East Anglia.