Digital Experiences
A restaurant site built around one job — getting a table booked — instead of a photo gallery with a reservation link buried at the bottom.
Project Overview
The client was a 40-seat independent restaurant whose existing site was a single scrolling page: photo carousel, embedded PDF menu, and a reservation link near the very bottom that most visitors never reached on mobile.
Problem
Most visitors arrive already intending to book — from a search result, a review site, or a friend's recommendation — and a site that makes them scroll past a gallery to find the reservation link is actively losing bookings to the friction of its own layout.
Discovery
Discovery focused on the actual visitor intent behind a restaurant site visit — booking a table, checking hours, or confirming the menu fits a dietary need — and designing the homepage around the first of those, since it's what most visitors came to do.
Solution
A reservations widget sits above the fold on every page, the menu renders as real, scannable text instead of a PDF, and hours and location are visible without scrolling — with the photography moved to support the story rather than lead it.
Design Process
Layout decisions were tested against a simple question — can a visitor book a table in three taps from a phone — before any visual styling was finalized, since a beautiful site that fails that test isn't doing its job.
Technical Architecture
A Next.js site embeds a third-party reservations widget via its API rather than an iframe, so the booking flow matches the site's own visual design instead of looking like a bolted-on external tool.
Implementation
Menu content was rebuilt as structured data rather than a static PDF, so seasonal changes are a content update rather than a design request every time a dish changes.
Technologies Used
Key Features
A reservations widget visible above the fold on every page, not just a contact page
A real, scannable menu instead of an embedded PDF
Structured menu content that updates without a design request each season
Hours, location, and booking all visible without scrolling on mobile
Challenges
Restaurant sites default to photo-first design, but for a visitor who already intends to book, a gallery between them and the reservation link is friction dressed up as atmosphere.
Most reservation platforms hand you an iframe or a redirect — getting the booking flow to feel native to the site's own design took working against the widget's default embed rather than accepting it as-is.
Outcome
The finished site turned booking from a multi-scroll search into a three-tap action from any page, with the menu and photography supporting that goal instead of competing with it.
Lessons Learned
A restaurant site isn't a portfolio — most visitors already decided to eat there before landing on the page, and the entire design should get out of the way of the one action they came to take.
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