This small personal project came about because I was regularly involved in Whatsapp discussions with people asking about where they could find hunter hirelings in my area.
I knew a few people who provided the service, or used to, but not many, so I set about searching the web for more providers.
Long story short, it wasn’t easy. Some providers had a good web presence but were not showing up well in typical hireling searches and others were only found via word of mouth and or a poll of Facebook followers.
Even when I did find providers it was not necessarily clear which areas they providers horses for and how far afield they were prepared to travel.
It seemed to me that the whole process would be much easier if there was a directory of hireling providers on the web which brought all the different contact details together.
What are hunter hirelings?
Hunter hireling are horses which can be hired for a day of trail hunting. The provider will bring the horse to the meet (or close by) for you and it will be ready to go. When you have finished the day they will be there to meet you and take the horse back home again.
What does a hunter hireling cost?
Typically a hunter hireling will cost you between £150 and £250 for a two to three hour trail hunt.
Where do you get a hunter hireling?
Well this is the problem. There are providers all over the UK and Ireland but some of them are not easy to find and are only really shared by word of mouth. This site set out to make it easier for people to search for providers in a particular area.
Creating the hunter hireling site
For a simple and scalable site I deployed one of my WordPress blueprint instances which included Advanced Custom Fields and Bricks. ACF was going to make management of custom post types straightforward and Bricks makes it really easy to query loop CPTs and taxonomy terms without any coding.
I made a post type for Hireling providers and gave them a taxonomy of County, to indicate the areas they cover.
Having done that I created a template for county archives which listed all the providers covering that area but added a term loop at the top of each page to list all the other counties.
I was going to add a single provided template but realised that actually the archive page would list all the contact details necessary.
On the home page I added a map which includes all the providers as map pins using their Google map locations.
The site is now live at hunterhirelings.co.uk.