Three questions, asked while walking.
Nobody researches a cafe. They check whether you are open, where you are, and what the food is like — usually one-handed, in the rain.
Invented business · nobody paid for this
The Copper Kettle does not exist. The name, the people, the prices and the phone numbers are all fictional, with the numbers taken from the ranges Ofcom reserves for drama. The rest of this journal is notes on real, paid work — this one is a speculative build, and it is labelled that way so the two are never mistaken for each other. The design problem underneath it is real, and so is the finished, working site.
Kitchen & coffee house · Beverley
A neighbourhood kitchen and coffee house. Seasonal plates, unhurried weekend brunch, the sort of place with a specials board that changes on a Tuesday.
The design question is not what a cafe website should contain. It is what somebody is doing at the moment they open it — and the answer is almost always walking, one-handed, deciding between you and somewhere else within about a minute.
Open, where, and what's the food
Those are the three questions, roughly in that order, and everything else is a distant fourth. A cafe site that leads with a paragraph about the founders' passion for provenance has answered none of them.
So the hours sit at the top, stated plainly, with today's not buried in a table of seven identical rows. The address is a line of text you can read without tapping, not only a map embed that costs a second of load and a scroll to interpret.
The most-asked question deserves the most-visible answer. It almost never gets it.
The menu is the website
The single most common failure on a cafe site is the menu as a PDF. It downloads, it opens in another app, it is set for A4 so it arrives at ten per cent zoom, and on a phone in the street that is the end of the visit.
Here the menu is the centre of the page as real text — which means it is legible at any size, readable by a screen reader, and findable by search when somebody looks for the dish rather than the cafe. It also means the owner can change a price without opening design software, which is the difference between a menu that stays current and one that is eighteen months stale.
Warm, without the costume
Independent cafes get pushed toward one of two looks: chalkboard-and-bunting cosy, or the stripped concrete-and-Helvetica thing every third-wave coffee bar adopted a decade ago. Both are costumes, and both are worn by hundreds of others.
Warm neutrals and hand-set menu typography do the job instead: it reads as somewhere that cooks properly and does not rush you, which is the actual proposition, without dressing up as a genre.