A Case Study:
Railtown Cafe
Railtown Cafe started with a single splash page posted online listing the address and hours of their cafe. As their business grew, that cafe became the flagship and three more locations were opened. The web presence now needed to reflect a growing brand with multiple listings for different locations, opening times, daily specials, and map location links.
Discovery
The new site required the production of a new web style guide
that would be the aesthetic backbone for all the brand’s visual elements online. Railtown Cafe is a sister-brand to Railtown Catering; we built both of their websites using WordPress to best integrate with their administrative team and training. These two sites are inter-navigable, while maintaining their separate brand identities, assisting visitors in finding their other brand, experiencing seamless checkout flows, and helping to increase the SEO for both sites.
Information Architecture (IA) and User Experience (UX)
Railtown Cafe's new website offers so much more than before
and visitors to their updated website need to access more information than a single page could allow. Daily features, multiple locations and hours of operation, image galleries, specials, and hiring opportunities. One other key consideration was that the inter-navigability of the two sister brand sites meant navigation had to be as simple and smooth as possible.
The end result is that users are never more than a couple clicks away from the resources or content they are looking for, across both sites.
DESIGN & PROTOTYPING
Hand-illustrated map locations. Seriously mouth watering food photography.
Refreshed branding assets. We had a ton of great content and design cues to work with here and the final look and feel of the site is a perfect reflection of the physical spaces of the cafe and their brand identity.
Plus the companies growth from a single location into multiples, we were presented with some enticing creative avenues, like turning an illustration into an interactive digital mapping experience.
DEVELOPMENT & DATABASING
The design requirements and general featureset of the websites instructed
much of the development cycle, and generally was a matter of making sure the site performed as well as it looked. We applied a combination of off the shelf and custom tools and technologies to improve both marketing results and user experiences. These included schema.io markups for SEO improvement, in line google maps, light box features, easy to edit banner carousels and menus, a fun interactive hand drawn map, online ordering and shipping modules, social links, and job listings.
Conclusions & Insights
From a splash page to a multi-functioning, multi-page website - this project increased visitation by roughly 75%. Increased traffic for jobs pages, multiple cafe locations/hours, daily specials, and news articles meant an increase in SEO as visitors were now spending 50% more time on the website and moving between the pages to learn more about Railtown Cafe, plus clicking over to their sister company, Railtown Catering. Please click here to see our case study for that website redesign project as well: Railtown Catering.
Technologies Used:
WordPress, Google Hosted Libraries, Schema.io, Advanced Custom Fields, LightGallery.js, Cloudflare, ZURB Foundation, Tailwind CSS, PHP, Google Remarketing Tag
