This & That cafe website
- Client: This & That Cafe, Manchester
- Services: Website hosting and social media management
- Website: ThisAndThatCafe.co.uk
- Source code: on git.chobble.com
This & That is a Manchester institution, famous for its "rice and three" curry dishes. It's been going since 1984 and it's a fixture of the Northern Quarter, tucked down an alley that's easy to walk straight past.
Reclaiming the domain
When I started working with them in 2016, their old website had expired and been picked up by domain squatters, who'd stuck a spammy landing page on it. The first job was getting the domain back through Nominet, which sorted the immediate problem, and then I set up a new site mirroring the content they'd had before.
It runs on my £10/month hosting - the "no support" package, because the site changes so rarely that there's not much to support. That suits the business: This & That has barely changed since the 1980s, and its website doesn't need to either.
What the site does
It's a simple, fast-loading static site built around the one thing people nearly always turn up looking for, which is the menu. The current dishes and prices sit right there on an ordinary HTML page that loads instantly on a phone, so someone googling "this and that menu" while they're walking round town gets what they want straight away.
The site has grown a bit over the years - a vegan menu page, a reviews section, a few more contact links - but slowly, the same way the cafe does. When something does need changing I'll usually have it done within a day, though that doesn't come up often.
Technical details
The site is built as a static "Jekyll" website with perfect Lighthouse performance scores, and it works the same on a small phone as on a big monitor. There's only a little JavaScript, for the Google Maps embed and for GoatCounter, which is privacy-preserving analytics that doesn't need a cookie banner.
During the COVID lockdowns I added a Deliveroo integration fairly quickly so they could keep serving while the dining room was shut. I keep an eye on where the site ranks for its key search terms using SerpBear.
Social media
I look after their Facebook page, posting once or twice a month rather than the daily grind restaurants often feel they're supposed to keep up. The posts that do best by a mile are the ones where a celebrity's been in - those bring in new customers.
I've got Google Alerts set up so I hear about it whenever someone reviews the cafe or mentions it in an article. I'll share the good ones on social media and now and then copy one over to the website, which keeps things looking current without much ongoing work.
Successful restaurants get approached about partnerships and online listings constantly, so when one of those emails lands they forward it to me and I tell them whether it's worth bothering with or whether it's just someone after their money. It saves them getting talked into things they don't need.
Why it works
The site matches the business - simple, honest, reliable, and rarely changing. It's been doing its job since 2016 without any fuss, giving visitors exactly what they came for. It doesn't try to be flashy, because the cafe isn't, and a place whose whole appeal is the food doesn't need a website getting in the way of finding it.
Source code
The complete source code is available on my Git forge. You're welcome to clone it if you'd like a site like it, though I'd point you at the newer Chobble Template as a starting point instead.
If your restaurant's website is slow, expensive, or hard to change, fill in the form below and we can talk about a simpler one.