Anchor & Hope ⚓ | Website design by Hey Joe Studio 🚀

Web Design
Web Development

The Anchor & Hope is a multi award-winning gastro pub in London Waterloo, close to the Old Vic and New Vic theatres. Despite being in business for over a decade, this website is their first ever web presence.

Working with the Anchor & Hope team I develped a brief to create a simple design framework that could be re-purposed by the pub’s sister venues, including Great Queen Street Restaurant and The Magdalen Arms. The ability to publish daily menus with ease was another key requirement.

The result was a modest and simple approach, utilising a framework that could be repurposed across all three sites. The designs aim to showcase the pubs food, with an emphasis on stunning food photography by Patricia Niven, alonside concise and focussed content.

The Process

The websites are fully responsive, working across devices from smartphones to desktop computers. We felt the need for a responsive design was essential having studied the analytics of the website for Le Café Anglais where mobile usage was over 20%.

Perhaps more importantly this informed critical decisions regarding the user interface – if so many users were likely to use a smart phone to access the site, they would be unlikely to want to navigate multiple pages to reach key information like contact details and opening times.

With that in mind, we put opening times and contact details on the homepage and the contact telephone number is prominently positioned in the header throughout the site.

It was agreed that the homepage should have strong visual impact by utilising the greatest asset of all 3 venues: their food. With that in mind the photographer Patricia Niven was commissioned to photograph some of the wonderful menu items to appear on a homepage image scroller.

Staff are able to update daily menus using the content management system by simply copying and pasting the text from the Word documents they use to print menus in-house.

Great Queen Street restaurant website screenshot — Great Queen Street Restaurant website