A website a café can actually update

Open the website of almost any small café and you will find last winter’s opening hours, a menu with dishes that no longer exist and a “News” page whose latest post is about a summer festival two years ago. Nobody planned it that way. The site was built, launched, and then quietly abandoned, because changing anything required calling the person who built it.

Over the last few years we have changed how we build sites for small businesses. The goal is simple: the owner should be able to change the three things that change most often without help, in under five minutes, from a phone.

Find the three things that change

For a café it is nearly always the same list: opening hours, the menu and one short announcement (“closed on Monday for a private event”). Everything else — the story, the photos, the address — changes once a year at most.

We design those three things as separate, very plain blocks. Opening hours are a short list, not an image. The menu is text, not a PDF. The announcement is a single line at the top of the page that disappears when it is empty.

Fewer pages, more care

A café does not need a ten-page website. Most of ours have a single long page plus a menu page. Fewer pages means fewer places for information to go out of date, and visitors find what they came for faster.

Hand over properly

At the end of a project we sit down with the person who will actually maintain the site — often not the owner — and change the opening hours together. Then we write a one-page guide with screenshots. It sounds obvious, but it is the step most often skipped, and it is the one that decides whether the site will still be correct next year.

• Opening hours as text, never as an image.
• Menus as text, with prices that are easy to edit.
• One announcement line, hidden when empty.
• A written guide and a practice session at handover.

None of this is clever. It just respects how small businesses really work: busy people, little time, and a website that has to look after itself most of the year.