case study

Project details

• Client —  Franck Amand
• URL —  www.viedechateaux.ie

What was required

Vie de Chateaux is a well known French cuisine restaurant in Naas, Co. Kildare that has a sister café, VDC@Home. Both businesses used a WordPress based website to showcase themselves as well as sell gift vouchers, allow online bookings and accept online orders for food. Following the sale of the sister company a new website was required that reflected the high quality food served and service Vie de Chateaux is known for.

Project insight

What was required?

Vie de Chateaux is a well known French cuisine restaurant in Naas, Co. Kildare that has a sister café, VDC@Home. Both businesses used a WordPress based website to showcase themselves as well as sell gift vouchers, allow online bookings and accept online orders for food. Following the sale of the sister company a new website was required that reflected the high quality food served and service Vie de Chateaux is known for.

Project insight

The footer of this site revealed it was first built in 2013 so an update was badly needed. It was slow extremely slow in performance and no optimised particularly well for mobile. The main requirements were to reflect the warmth and quality of the restaurant, to continue the sale of gift vouchers and improve the online reservations. Plus the site had to be easy to maintain.

Using the brand colours, a new fresh mobile optimised website was designed. Typography would feature very heavily; DM Serif and Montserrat provided a modern French feel that was still legible and easy to read.

Architecture rethink

WordPress can suffer from plugin bloat; too many will decrease site performance and maintenance increases. A fresh start was taken and only using the absolute minimum number of plugins. Once the design was finalised I could strip back the number to less than ten. As with all projects I develop, Advanced Custom Fields was key to the success. When content requirements extends beyond the standard offering, ACF allows content to be added, reused and managed in a very effective manner.

Dinner Menus

An excellent example of this were the food menus. Both ‘a la carte’ and ‘specials’ dishes can be added and assigned to any of the three menus; dinner, lunch and Sunday with ease. Equally allergens and if the dish is vegetarian can be added to each dish. New menus are easily built simply by assigning dishes to them. It was also possible to remove dishes from a menu with our loosing the information but then introduced at an later date.

Drinks Menus

The restaurant also has an extensive wine menu spanning multiple French appellations. Once again ACF allowed the development of highly detailed menus that are easily managed. Some sixty vintages, some by the glass all by the bottle are easily managed in terms of price and availability. For example if a fine Bordeaux runs out, it can disabled from the menu until such time as it is restocked. A similar approach was taken with the beer, cider and soft-drinks selection.

Galleries

Food is very visual in terms of presentation, something that Vie de Chateau excels at. Galleries to show case their food and restaurant are used extensively; all controlled by ACF. The manager just need to upload new images and the dashboard will resize and optimise the new images when added to a gallery.

Vouchers

Previously WooCommerce had been used to sell gift vouchers. While it is an excellent E-Commerce platform, to sell one product such as a voucher is an overkill. Gravity Forms, coupled with Gravity Perks produced an elegant solutions without the overheads of WooCommerce. Payment gateways such as PayPal and stripe are easily connected to produce a system which allows the same of voucher of multiple value that are sent to the lucky recipient and the dashboard makes light work of the administration. Future versions will use QR codes to make redemption even easier.

Bespoke is best

As with all projects I undertake building a bespoke solution is the best way forward. By understanding my customers needs I can design something that is held back by an out of the box WordPress theme. Having the requirements at hand, it is far easier to design and more importantly develop and build. Too often I have seen WordPress sites that rely heavily on expensive plugins that don’t always provide either the right solution, are just too expensive or the output they create is difficult to style. You want all the content to be seamless in terms of how it looks as well as how it behaves. A bespoke approach will generate the solution requires and afford code that that can be styled exactly as required. All the pages on this site were achieved by taking a UX/UI approach and coding using the ACF plugin as the backbone.