About the Project
The Mise is a UK trade news publication covering the hospitality and food service industry — restaurants, hotels, pubs & bars, chefs, food & drink, and features. The client needed a professional news site capable of publishing breaking stories quickly, organising content by category, and growing an audience through SEO and a newsletter offering.
The brief: build something that looks and performs like an established trade title from day one, without the overhead of a heavyweight CMS.
What We Built
A fully bespoke news publishing platform on the LocalWebsCoder CMS, including:
- Homepage with breaking news ticker — live scrolling headline bar for urgent industry stories
- Category sections — Restaurants, Hotels, Pubs & Bars, Chefs & People, Food & Drink, and Features, each with their own landing pages and filtered article feeds
- Three-column article layout — Recent Stories sidebar, hero feature article, and Latest News feed — optimised for high-volume publishing
- Article pages — full-width hero images, category and breaking news badges, structured body content, and related articles
- Newsletter signup — prominent CTA and subscription flow to build a direct readership
- RSS feed — auto-generated feed for syndication and news aggregators
- SEO architecture — category-level and article-level meta, Open Graph, structured data (NewsArticle schema), XML sitemap
- Hosting & management — fully managed UK hosting with SSL, CDN, and uptime monitoring
Tech Stack
Built on the LocalWebsCoder CMS — a bespoke PHP flat-file platform engineered for performance and security. No WordPress, no plugin vulnerabilities, no database bottlenecks slowing down a high-traffic news feed.
- CMS: LocalWebsCoder CMS (flat-file PHP)
- Frontend: Tailwind CSS, Vanilla JavaScript
- SEO: NewsArticle schema, Open Graph, category meta strategy, XML sitemap
- Content: Flat-file Markdown articles with frontmatter — fast to publish, easy to manage
- Hosting: Managed UK hosting — SSL, CDN, uptime monitoring
- Performance: Sub-second load times, optimised image delivery, mobile-first build
Result
A polished, fast, and credible trade news platform that positions The Mise as a go-to source for UK hospitality industry professionals — built to publish at pace, rank in search, and grow a loyal readership through quality content and a clean reading experience.
