Optimized Restaurant Website for Better UX & Brand Adherence

I worked with the team at Cole's French Dip to create a new website for their historic bar.

Established in 1908, Cole's is the oldest operating public house in Los Angeles, and (if you ask anyone who knows) invented the French Dip Sandwich.

Unfortunately, the website Cole's had was little more than a landing page with their address on it. No mention of their history, no real incorporation of their brand identity, a phone number that had been long since disconnected—It didn't have an updated menu!

I sent the GM a list of questions to inform my designs, and I learned he wanted to incorporate the pub's brand identity and story while engaging customers and driving sales both in person and online.

Since a significant portion of the bars' traffic was coming from mobile devices, I wanted to created something that was easy to navigate on both desktop and mobile. I also wanted to create a menu that wasn't an image or a PDF so that it would be accessible, responsive, and help with SEO.

The bar and restaurant was in the early stages of accepting online food orders, so we wanted clear calls to action for ordering as well.

Luckily, I had access to a Drive folder with a complete brand guide, photos, and other assets. I went to work creating wireframes and mockups in Figma.

I showed the designs to the stakeholders involved, made some adjustments based on feedback, and moved to implementation.

After lots of blood, sweat, and tears poured into an old version of Wix's Editor (this was not by choice, Studio had not come out yet), we launched Cole's new site!

The results were.

Increased website traffic.

Improved SEO.

More visitors through the door. (Ok, this is hard to measure directly, but the results did correlate!)

Increased sales! (Same thing as above.)

I've added screenshots below as well as a link to the live project. Thanks for reading!