brightfive were called in to build the previous Alnwick Castle website some 4 years ago and were therefore the natural choice to give it a substantial makeover.

The old site was starting to look a little long in the tooth and wasn’t really doing this amazingly popular historical vistor attraction justice. Budget was reasonably tight so we decided to base the new site around the new brightsites CMS (content management system). This allowed us to get a pretty simple site layout going relatively quickly and gave the team at Alnwick Castle the ability to very easily add new pages and create some great looking content.

The website also manages a diary of events and serves up loads of great downloadable resources from a family tree and journalist guidelines, to competition entry forms and upcoming festival literature.

Alnwick Castle have also taken advantage of our email newsletter application which allows them to send beautifully designed promotional communication to people who have signed up to receive them on the website. There are currently over 3000 people on the list and it’s growing by the week!

On a technical note, we made sure the the old Google listings mapped perfectly onto the new content so that visitors who came to us from these old links still saw relevant content. The new content management system allows us to optimise each page very specifically if required and it’s these kind of features that has given the Alnwick Castle site some of the best results we’ve ever seen. We’re obviously ranking #1 for Alnwick and Alnwick Castle but we normally rank in the top 3 for the word castle!

We look forward to our continuing relationship with the team at Alnwick to keep improving the site so that it raises the profile of the attraction and brings new visitors to the Castle.

Visit the new website at www.alnwickcastle.com.