Fun at the Fair
- Client: DB Entertainment Ltd, Rotherham
- Services: Website development and ongoing content
- Website: allthefunatthefair.co.uk
Fun at the Fair is the outdoor funfair and fairground ride hire arm of DB Entertainment, a Rotherham company that has been going since 1999. It started out hiring PA systems for live events around South Yorkshire, and one client wanting a bouncy castle alongside the speakers later, the warehouse filled up with real rides - dodgems, a waltzer, a ferris wheel, a ghost train. Everything lives in a 25,000 sq ft warehouse with £5M public liability cover, the delivering is done with their own vans and lorries, and the bigger rides go out with operators on the payroll. Clients over the years have included Amazon, Alzheimer's Society, Prostate Cancer UK and council events teams at Sheffield, Doncaster and Rotherham.
Who this page is for
Plainly: if you run a hire, attractions or events business with a catalogue this size and you're weighing me up for a website, this page is for that - the honest answer about costs is on the prices page (a flat £200/hour for build work, hosting from £10 a month). If you landed here looking to book dodgems or a helter skelter for your own event, this isn't the booking page - everything rides-related is at allthefunatthefair.co.uk and the team answers the phone on 0845 468 0590.
The build
It's the Chobble Template with a custom theme, built as a static site and deployed automatically through GitHub Actions to Bunny's CDN - staging for branches, production for main. The catalogue is at the big end: 68 product pages across 8 categories, each with a stats block (footprints, heights, hire-from pricing with the VAT made plain), FAQs and specifications, plus 14 customer reviews fetched from Google, Facebook and Trustpilot through the Apify-based fetcher behind my Google reviews scraper.
The 21 location pages come in two patterns: town and city pages (Manchester to Glasgow, dodgems to helter skelters), and showground or venue pages for places the team knows from setting up on their fields - Newark Showground, Penistone Showground, the Yorkshire Event Centre at Harrogate, the NEC in Birmingham. Old ecommerce URLs from the previous shop, the /category/ paths with product IDs in them, all redirect to their new homes so none of Google's existing index was lost.
Where the time went
The honest part of this build is the content, and it's where most of the time actually goes: 68 product pages and 21 location pages is a tonne of collating. The priorities for that work are, roughly: prices checked against the product records with the VAT made plain, the physical details a council or venue manager actually needs on the day (footprints, heights, power), and copy adapted from the sibling sites (Exhibition Game Hire, Mobile Climbing Wall Hire, Staging Events) re-toned for the outdoor funfair context rather than written from scratch. Facts that can't be verified against a source record stay out of the copy - the site would rather say nothing than invent something.
The LLMs handled the HTML, and the blocks layout gave them an easy time of it, so the build cost is my time collating and checking. The same honesty runs through what the copy says: £5M public liability cover stated up front, and where a small remainder of kit comes from long-standing showmen rather than their own yard, the site says so plainly.
If you run a hire business with a catalogue this size, fill in the form below.