Website design for cafés and small restaurants

Four questions, one screen

People open a café site for a reason, and it is almost never to admire the design. They want to know: are you open, where are you, what is on, and can I book.

Every one of those is answerable above the fold on a phone. Most café sites answer none of them without a scroll and a tap: hours buried in a footer, the menu as a PDF, the address as an image, booking through a third-party platform that opens a new tab and forgets where it came from.

The whole design problem is fitting those four answers into the first screen without making it look like a directory listing. That is solvable. It is mostly a matter of deciding what not to put there.

The menu should not be a PDF

A PDF is a document, not a web page. On a phone it opens in a viewer, needs pinching, cannot be searched, cannot be read by a screen reader, cannot be indexed, and goes stale the moment a price changes.

A menu rendered as HTML is faster to update, legible at any size, searchable, translatable by the browser, and — the part that matters commercially — it can carry structured data that tells search engines exactly what you serve and when.

For a kitchen that changes the board weekly, the difference is not aesthetic. It is whether updating the menu takes thirty seconds on a phone or a call to whoever made the PDF.

Hours, location, and the questions that eat your day

Most of the calls a small café takes are the same three: are you open, where exactly are you, do you take bookings. Each one is a minute of someone's shift, and each is fully answerable by a page that loads in under a second.

We build opening hours as structured data rather than a paragraph, so search results and maps show them correctly and they update from one place. The address links straight into the phone's map app rather than to a desktop map that has to be navigated by hand.

And for the booking question, we are honest about it: if you do not take bookings, say so at the top. A visitor who learns that in two seconds stays; one who fills in a form and waits three days does not.

Photographs that look like the room

Nearly every café site has the same three photographs: a latte from directly above, a croissant on a marble counter, and a plant. They could belong to any café in any city, which means they do no work at all.

What actually helps is the room at the hour people come. The light through the window at nine in the morning. The counter from the doorway, so a first-time visitor knows what they are walking into. The one table by the window that everyone wants.

Those are not styled photographs and they do not need a photographer with a lighting rig. They need to be taken on a quiet morning, before service, by someone who knows which side of the room the sun is on.

• The room from the doorway, at the hour people arrive
• The counter as a visitor first sees it, not from above
• One detail that is specific to your place and no other

What we build

Small, and finished

A café site is three to five pages. Built properly that is a short project — a few weeks, not a few months — and it should not come with a retainer attached.

What it does need is to be fast on a phone on mobile data, which is where nearly all of the traffic comes from, and to be maintainable by whoever is behind the counter rather than by an agency.

We hand over the whole thing — hosting, domain, repository, and a one-page guide to changing the menu and the hours. If you never call us again, the site should still work in three years.

What we don't build

A café does not need a content marketing programme, a newsletter funnel, a loyalty app or a booking platform. Adding those to a site this size makes it slower to load and harder to maintain, and none of them fixes the four questions above the fold.

If the site is fast, the menu is current, the hours are right and the address opens the right app, it is doing its job. Everything else is optional, and most of it is someone else's business model rather than yours.