Two Heads, One Ambition & A New Website
Legacy blog migration draft — refresh and editorial review required before publication.
Unpublished legacy migration draft. The source copy below is for editorial review only. It must not be published until the checklist is complete. Historic links and images have been removed.
Source: https://uisgebeatha.co.uk/hankey-bannister-webiste/ (retrieved 2026-10-23T14:11:13+00:00).
Refresh checklist
- Check every factual statement against a current primary or otherwise permitted source.
- Replace old bottle recommendations, retail prices and availability with the current catalogue where relevant.
- Add a current introduction, title, description and internal links for the intended blog audience.
- Review alcohol-marketing wording and disclose any commercial relationship before publication.
- Resolve overlap with Whiskipedia: retain an editorial angle or link there for the enduring explanation.
Legacy source copy
In addition to being a whisky enthusiast I’m also a digital marketer, and I’ve previously written about my whisky personal pet peeves – which you can find in my marketing article. Every now and again though you come across a site which does it well, reminding you that some brands are embracing digital.
Mobile First Whisky
The new Hankey Bannister website by Equator is one such example. although far from perfect it shows how easy it really is to get it right. both the mobile and desktop experience are quick it’s easily navigable and best of all it looks great. We can only hope that Inver House Distillers which also owns and operates five of Scotland’s active distilleries: Old Pulteney Distillery, The Speyburn-Glenlivet Distillery, Balblair Distillery, Knockdhu Distillery and Balmenach Distillery will adopt the same approach across their other websites. Of these only anCnoc is navigable on a mobile.
Always one to nit-pic however I do of course have a few bug bears:
Navigating the brands history on a mobile requires you noticing it uses a slider, the directional arrows are almost invisible
The images are larger than they need to be, and due to the use of query strings are unlikely to cache
The blog URLs use query-string rather than more meaningful permalinks
The sites headers are far from SEO friendly, in particular the lack of H2s in some instances
Incredibly that’s it! The site is that good, now if I can only source a bottle…
Malt Whisky and the Web
It’s somewhat baffling that the most digitally aware brands are those looking towards overseas markets, the brand view its largest potential growth areas as being mobile traffic from Mozambique, Ukraine, Russia and South Africa. This international outlook may well be reflective of the groups status as a subsidiary of Thai Beverages, more likely though this indicates a level of snobbery still associated with the use of grain whisky in the domestic market.
Well while I cannot as yet speak to the quality of the Hankey Bannister offering I’ll be keeping an eye open, any brand making the effort to embrace digital is more likely to end up in my news feed. Let’s just hope their blog becomes more active!