The Scary Biscuits Promotions website

Scary Biscuits is the promotions business of Morag Neil, a friend of mine. Based in Edinburgh, Scotland, she is a successful independent music and theatre promoter, producer and events organiser.

NOTE: I have recently re-done this website again and will be updating this post.

You can visit the brand new Scary Biscuits Promotions website (opens in a new tab).

The previous website

I met Morag because she was a regular on my forum, The Doctor Who Forum. When I am up in Scotland we try to meet up and if she’s down in London, for a music gig for example, I’ll try to pop along.

Morag’s old website was basic and was built in 2006. It was laid out using tables aso not responsive on modern devices. I suggested I could quickly do something new and modern for her.

The new website

I had an interesting problem that I had never had to deal with before or since. The Scary Biscuits website site was hosted on a server that Morag did not have access too. She did have admin access to the website though.

Luckily it was built on WordPress and WordPress enables you to upload new themes as zip files.

I therefore had to build a new theme for the website offline until I was more or less happy with it. I built it on my own server so I could let Morag see how it was coming on and get her input.

I think we only ever disagreed on one thing, the logo. I wanted to update it but she said argued it was her company identity. So I kept it the same but produced a new, higher resolution version. In the end she agreed I could chop the top off for the website.

I kept the feel of the old website. It still has a dark background, for example, but I changed the yellow to white and grey. I also made the orange links slightly more red (using the red in the logo was a bit too much).

I made it two columns, but kept the links. I broke them into top navigation and a client list in the sidebar. I also added latest news headlines in the sidebar and kept the Twitter feed. Morag was very insistent on Twitter as she does a lot of promotion and networking on Twitter.

I had a prospective client recently approach me. He said he was nervous about contacting me because he thought my website looked very professional. He thought, from the look of it, that I might be too big a promoter for him.

Morag Neil
Scary Biscuits Promotions

Custom Post Types

I created plugins for Custom Post Types for “Clients” and for “Galleries”.

This means that any clients that are added will automatically appear on the Home page, using the featured image for that client.

The galleries post type produced a Galleries page for the site that automatically showed all galleries in the same way.

This all made it very easy for Morag to use and update.

Custom Fields

For the Home page I used Custom Fields to create the banner image. It would be a lot easier to do this these days.

Using Custom Fields enables Morag to easily change the image, the text and the colour of the text box without my help.

Reception

After uploading the new theme and plugins as zip files it went live. I was then able to make some minor changes via the admin area in WordPress, and Morag was very pleased.