If you’ve visited the Rock A Doodle Do website recently, you may have noticed that things look a little different. In fact, quite a lot has changed.
Over the last few months, we’ve been giving the website a serious overhaul. Not because we wanted to change who we are, but because the site needed to do a better job of showing exactly what Rock A Doodle Do has become.
We’re no longer a business with a handful of hot sauces and a simple online shop. Our range has grown, our collaborations have grown, our retail presence has grown and, most importantly, the number of people discovering our sauces has grown.
The website needed to catch up.
So, we’ve been working through everything from product photography and descriptions to navigation, search engine optimisation, blogs, product collections and the overall way you discover our sauces.
Here’s what we’ve changed.
One of our biggest priorities was making the site easier to navigate.
When you land on the website, we want you to be able to get to the products you actually want without digging around. Whether you’re looking for hot sauces, BBQ sauces, gift boxes, award-winning products or one of our special ranges, the journey around the website is now much clearer.
We’ve also made more space for the ranges that have become an important part of the Rock A Doodle Do story, including Banshee BBQ, our RADD sauces and our Dunville collaborations.
Not everyone shops in the same way. Some people know exactly which bottle they want. Others arrive looking for “a really hot sauce”, “a BBQ sauce” or something made with a particular chilli.
The new structure is designed to make all of those journeys easier.
A bottle of hot sauce can contain a ridiculous amount of work, but an old product page with two lines of text doesn’t always tell that story.
That’s something we’ve been changing across the site.
We’ve been rewriting and expanding product descriptions so that you get a much better idea of what each sauce tastes like, how hot it is, what goes into it and what foods it works with.
Instead of simply telling you that something is “hot” or “fruity”, we want to tell you what makes it different.
Caribbean Heat, for example, is now presented around the flavours that define it: Scotch Bonnet chilli, mango, pineapple and Jamaican curry spices. Scotch Symphony puts the focus on fruity Scotch Bonnet flavour rather than treating heat as the only thing worth talking about.
That approach is being carried across the range.
Because heat matters, but flavour matters more.
We’ve also been putting a huge amount of work into how the products look online.
Sauces are physical products. You pick up the bottle, look at the label, see the colour of the sauce and get a feel for what it is before you ever taste it.
Online, photography has to do that job.
We’ve been cleaning up product images, standardising bottle presentation, creating clearer white-background images and developing new lifestyle photography that puts the sauces into realistic food, BBQ and kitchen environments.
At the same time, we’ve been careful to keep the bottles, labels, names and branding true to the real products.
The goal is simple: what arrives at your door should look like the product you saw online.
Rock A Doodle Do has always been associated with serious heat.
We use chillies such as Scotch Bonnet, Habanero, Ghost Chilli, Dorset Naga, Trinidad Scorpion and Carolina Reaper, and we’re never going to stop making sauces for people who like things ridiculously hot.
But the website is now doing a better job of showing that we’re about much more than heat.
There are smoky sauces. Fruity sauces. Sweet sauces. Whiskey-based sauces. Caribbean-inspired sauces. BBQ sauces. Sauces for wings, burgers, steak, chicken, curries and marinades.
Even some of our hottest products have been developed around flavour first.
That is a much bigger part of the website now because it is a much bigger part of who we are.
We’ve been fortunate enough over the years to pick up more than 20 industry awards, including recognition from the Guild of Fine Food and Blas na hÉireann.
Previously, it wasn’t always obvious when browsing the website just how many of the products had been recognised.
We’ve been changing that too.
Award-winning sauces are easier to discover, and where a product has a story behind its award, we want that story to be part of the page.
Those details matter.
They are part of what makes the sauce ours.
There has always been more going on behind this business than a list of ingredients.
Rock A Doodle Do started in Belfast and has grown through years of experimenting, cooking, selling, collaborating and occasionally making sauces that are probably hotter than sensible people should consume.
We’ve worked with musicians, distilleries, retailers and other brilliant businesses. We’ve created products connected with Snow Patrol, Metallica and Blackened Whiskey, Dunville’s Whiskey, Peter Buck and Luke Haines, among others.
We wanted the website to tell more of that story.
That means giving our collaborations more space, making our Belfast identity clearer and showing visitors that there are real people, real ingredients and real stories behind the products.
Another major change is the amount of useful content we’re building around the shop.
Not everyone who lands on our website is ready to buy immediately.
Sometimes you want to know what a chilli tastes like. Sometimes you want a recipe. Sometimes you want to know what makes a Carolina Reaper different from a Ghost Chilli or what food works best with a particular sauce.
That is why we’ve been expanding the blog and recipe side of the website.
We’ve added more content about our ranges, including the Banshee BBQ collection and the story behind Violent Intentions, as well as recipes and chilli-related features.
Over time, we want the site to become somewhere you can come for ideas as well as products.
Some of the biggest website changes are the ones you probably won’t notice.
We’ve been doing a lot of work behind the scenes on SEO – search engine optimisation – to make it easier for people to discover Rock A Doodle Do through Google and other search engines.
That includes improving product titles, rewriting descriptions, targeting more useful search terms, improving page structure, strengthening internal links and creating content around the things people genuinely search for.
Instead of trying to rank for vague terms, we’re putting more emphasis on ingredients, chilli varieties, flavours and product styles:
Scotch Bonnet chilli sauce. Carolina Reaper hot sauce. Belfast hot sauce. Spicy BBQ sauce. Award-winning hot sauce.
These are the kinds of searches that actually describe what we make.
It isn’t glamorous work, but it matters.
If somebody is looking for an Irish-made Scotch Bonnet sauce or a seriously hot Carolina Reaper sauce, we want them to be able to find us.
We’ve also brought more attention to best sellers and customer feedback.
For somebody discovering Rock A Doodle Do for the first time, choosing from a large range can be intimidating. Seeing what other customers love makes that first decision easier.
The updated site gives our best-selling products more visibility and puts genuine customer reactions closer to the shopping journey.
And, given some of the reactions our hotter sauces have produced over the years, those comments are often worth reading for entertainment alone.
Although the website is our online shop, Rock A Doodle Do isn’t an online-only business.
Our sauces are stocked by independent retailers across Ireland and Great Britain, and supporting those businesses remains extremely important to us.
We’ve continued to make retailer information available so customers can find places to buy Rock A Doodle Do in person.
The site can help whether you want a bottle delivered to your house or would rather pick one up from a local independent retailer.
The important thing is that none of these changes are about turning Rock A Doodle Do into something polished, corporate and unrecognisable.
We’re still obsessed with flavour.
We still like making things hot.
We still think food should be fun.
We still make sauces in Belfast with proper ingredients, serious chillies and absolutely no interest in being boring.
The new website simply does a better job of showing it.
And we’re not finished.
We’ll continue adding new products, improving photography, developing recipes, writing about chillies and BBQ, telling the stories behind our collaborations and making it easier to find the right sauce for you.
So have a look around.
Whether you want something smoky and sweet, fruity and spicy, loaded with Scotch Bonnet, built around Habanero, or containing enough Carolina Reaper to make you question your decision-making abilities, there’s probably a bottle waiting for you.
Welcome to the updated Rock A Doodle Do website.
Same Belfast attitude. Same obsession with flavour.
Just a much better place to discover it.
