When Oliver Kinsley got in touch about a website for his brand new restaurant, Rye Bistro, there was just one slight complication …
He needed it yesterday.
Rye Bistro had already started welcoming customers through the doors of its new home on Rye High Street and Oliver and his family had moved incredibly quickly to transform the premises into a French-inspired neighbourhood bistro. So while they were busy getting the restaurant ready, we had to move pretty quickly with the website too!
Oliver’s idea for Rye Bistro is pleasingly straightforward: good French-style bistro food, a relaxed atmosphere and sensible prices, using fresh local ingredients wherever possible. The restaurant is very much a family affair too, with Oliver working alongside his parents Dawn and Gary while Head Chef Chris looks after the kitchen.
So we needed a website that felt like the restaurant … smart, welcoming and uncomplicated.
Twenty Twenty-Five to the rescue
We built the new Rye Bistro website using WordPress and the default Twenty Twenty-Five block theme.
As regular readers will probably have noticed, we rather like using the latest WordPress default themes!
They give us a beautifully clean starting point without loading a website up with a massive premium theme, dozens of unnecessary options and half a tonne of JavaScript before we’ve even started.
For Rye Bistro that meant we could concentrate on the bits that actually mattered: presenting the restaurant properly, making the menu easy to find, giving people a simple route to booking a table and making sure it all worked nicely on phones.
Most importantly, it meant we could build it quickly.
Very quickly …
Fast to build. Fast to load.
The rush to get the website online didn’t mean we wanted to throw something together that we’d regret six months later.
Quite the opposite.
Using the WordPress block editor and Twenty Twenty-Five meant we could get the initial website designed, built and online without introducing loads of technical baggage that we’d only have to remove again later.
And the result is fast.
Really fast.
That matters for any website but particularly for a restaurant, where somebody is quite likely to be standing somewhere in Rye on their phone wondering where to eat tonight.
They don’t want to admire a loading animation.
They want to see the menu, decide whether they fancy it and book a table.
A little corner of France in Rye
Rye Bistro occupies a High Street premises next to The Grapevine and the restaurant itself has been designed around Oliver’s idea of bringing a little of the traditional French bistro feel to Rye.
According to Rye News, the idea came partly from looking at what Rye already had and spotting an obvious gap amongst the town’s British, Italian, Indian, Japanese and other restaurants. The result is a small, changing menu of bistro dishes, seasonal ingredients and homemade desserts, with produce sourced from local fisheries, butchers and suppliers where possible.
Oliver is only 26 but has already spent more than a decade working in hospitality, starting as a pot washer at 15 before moving through bartending and management and eventually into running hospitality businesses himself. Rye Bistro is the latest step in that slightly bonkers career trajectory.
And, much like the website, the restaurant itself seems to have gone from idea to reality at quite a pace.
Which perhaps explains why the website was required yesterday.
Built quickly … but built properly
There is a difference between building a website quickly and rushing one.
The first is about knowing what you actually need.
The second usually involves discovering what you should have done three months later.
By using WordPress core functionality and the Twenty Twenty-Five theme wherever possible, we were able to give Rye Bistro a website that was online quickly, is easy to maintain and isn’t dependent on a huge collection of third-party tools just to keep functioning.
It also gives Oliver plenty of room to develop the site as the restaurant develops.
Which is exactly how we like to build WordPress websites.
Simple where they can be.
Flexible where they need to be.
And fast.
Very fast …
Now Oliver just needs to worry about running the restaurant.
Which, compared with getting a website built yesterday, should be easy! 😉
Leave a Reply