The problem
This isn't a one-menu restaurant. There's a takeaway menu, a dine-in menu with dishes you can't get to take away, a Sunday buffet, a lunch and early-evening menu, and a tea-time offer on top. That's a lot of dishes and a lot of prices, and they change, as they do in any restaurant.
A restaurant website with prices on it is only useful if those prices are right. If the owner has to ask someone else every time a dish changes or a price goes up, the website soon falls behind the real menu. That's frustrating for customers, and for whoever is answering the phone.
Paul wanted a website that showed off the food properly and made it easy to order or book. Just as importantly, he wanted to keep the menus up to date himself.
What I built
A website that makes you hungry. The homepage gets straight to the point: who the restaurant is, the tea-time offer, and a big button to call and order or book a table. The four menus sit side by side under simple tabs, so you can flick between takeaway, dine-in, Sunday buffet and lunch without hunting around. The spice-level guide (from "touch hot" to "very hot") is right there with each menu, along with the notes people need, like gluten-free options and quoting the item number when you order.
Designed for phones. Most people looking at a takeaway menu are on their phone, often on the sofa deciding what to have. The site works properly on a small screen, and the phone number is one tap away wherever you are on the page.
An admin panel Paul uses himself. This is the part that makes the difference day to day. Behind a private sign-in, Paul can:
- change the name, description or price of any dish
- add new dishes and take old ones off
- press Publish, and the menus on the website update within a minute or two.
There's no new password to remember. Paul signs in with his Google account, and only approved email addresses can get in at all. Every change is logged, so if something ever looks wrong we can see what changed and when.
Before Paul started, I loaded the full existing menu into the system, so he began with everything already in place rather than a blank screen. He keeps it up to date from there.
How it's going
Paul uses the admin panel to edit menu items and prices himself, without having to wait for me or anyone else. That means the menus online match the menus in the restaurant, which is exactly what customers need when they're deciding what to order.
For a busy independent restaurant, that's the real win: a website the owner is in charge of, that doesn't go out of date the moment something changes in the kitchen.
In their words
"When a price changes or we add a new dish, I just update it on the website myself. It means the menus people see online match what we're actually serving, and I don't have to wait for anyone else to do it for me."
