Mel's Meals

Four kinds of catering on one site, without it becoming four sites.

What was needed

A new website for a catering company doing four quite different things. A wedding is booked a year ahead, after a tasting, by someone who has been looking at venues for months. An office lunch is ordered on a Tuesday for Thursday by whoever got given the job. A private dinner and a delivery box are different again, with different buyers, different budgets and different amounts of patience for a website.

One site had to serve all four without turning into four sites, or into a menu of services nobody can navigate. The brand and the food photography were already in place. The job was the build.

A route in for each job

Weddings, corporate, special occasions and experiences each own a top-level route, with the detail sitting beneath them where it belongs. Venue partners live under weddings, because that is the only place anyone looks for them. Office catering sits under corporate for the same reason. Delivery and private dining separate out under special occasions rather than competing with each other on one page.

The effect is that nobody has to read about the wrong thing to find the right one. Someone planning a wedding never encounters office lunch menus, and someone ordering for fifteen people on Thursday is not scrolling past wedding photography to get to a price.

Photography doing the selling

Food is bought with the eyes, and this client had the photography to justify that. The layouts give it room rather than fitting it around text: full-width imagery, a gallery that runs at scale, and service pages that open on a picture rather than a paragraph. Copy is there to support the decision, not to make the case on its own.

Menus that can change without a developer

Catering menus move with the season, with supply and with what a client asks for. Building them into pages would mean a developer every time something changed. They sit as documents that can be swapped whenever the kitchen updates them, which sounds like a compromise and is actually the reason the site has stayed current.

Delivery works differently, so it is built differently

Delivery is the only service that behaves like a shop, so it is the only part built like one. Customers choose quantities from a priced catalogue and send an order request rather than paying at a checkout.

That is deliberate. A kitchen has to know it can make what has been asked for, on the day it has been asked for, before it takes anyone’s money. An automated checkout would take the payment and leave someone to make the phone call afterwards.

More work

Websites and ecommerce