Demo · A1
A website for a specialty coffee shop - built to be found before anyone walks in.
Five pages, live, answering everything a customer checks before they put their coat on.
Live rather than a screenshot, because the first thing this site has to answer is whether the shop is open right now, and a picture cannot know that.
Five pages, warm photography, serif headlines and every fact a customer checks before walking in, published as text a search engine and an assistant can read. Buy this one and the same five pages are drawn for your room, your hours and your menu.
Spindle Row Coffee is a business we invented so there was something real to design for. It is not a client of ours, the prices on its menu are its own rather than ours, and its street, telephone number and email address reach nobody.
Built as
Multi-page
€1,000
Up to 5 pages · in 4 weeks · 2 rounds
Standard price €1,000 — no increases planned
See all three plansOpens the finished site, with our label across the top of it.
Judgement
What this build demonstrates
We read 22 specialty cafe websites, and they leave out the same things
Real sites across five markets, described by market and category only. Every one of them left its holiday hours to chance, and twenty-one of twenty-two stayed silent on step-free entry, transport, dogs and laptops. These businesses are good at coffee, and the pattern is far too uniform to be twenty-two people being careless: it is what the tools they were sold do by default.
The hours are on the page, and so are the exceptions
Christmas, Boxing Day, New Year and the summer close are published before they arrive, and the open-or-closed line states where it got its answer: from the hours published on this page. Research puts 44% of people arriving at a closed business in the past year, and 73% of them unlikely to return.
The whole menu is text, with every price and every allergen
Readable HTML rather than a PDF or a photograph of a chalkboard, so a search engine, a screen reader and an assistant can each quote a line of it. The access page runs on the same instinct pointed at the room: the door has a 20mm lip, and the one toilet is up two steps. Publishing what is awkward about the room is the credibility move, and it costs only words.
The first screen is the room, in warm photography
Every photograph on the site shares one grade, so the window, the long bench and the roaster read as one room on one morning. They are credited Unsplash images. Yours replaces each one with a photograph of your room.
Fit
The kind of business it suits
Any business with a door, an address and a clock, whose customers check something before they set off.
- Bakeries, delis and food shops
- Barbers and salons
- Bike shops, repair and framing
- Practices and clinics with walk-in hours
- Any business whose customers ask "are you open right now?"
A poor fit for a business with no premises, and for anyone selling to other businesses - the whole site is built around a door, an address and a clock.
Your site
Yours would be built the same way
Same price, same week, drawn for your trade instead of an invented one. You would see five design directions first, and you pick the one that ships.