Website Design & Development

Early and ongoing conversations with the owner and manager: how the brand should feel online, what guests ask before booking, and what staff update most: events, menus, and hours.

The tension was familiar: modern and premium, but never cold. It had to feel as welcoming as walking through the door.

Sat down with the owner and manager to walk through early ideas: mood, layout approaches, and how the site could feel premium without going cold. We discussed options and agreed on a general direction before any deep screen work.

The point was to avoid pouring hours into explorations that would miss the mark. Locking in the feel upfront made the detailed design phase faster and more confident.

Mapped how people find the restaurant (search, social, word of mouth) and what they need before booking: the vibe, readable menus, practical details, and booking that works on a phone.

Browsing and booking are one flow. Friction in the middle costs trust before anyone reaches BokaBord.

Looked at peer restaurant sites to see what felt premium, what looked like a template, and where booking got buried.

The same patterns kept showing up: beautiful photos, messy menus, hidden booking buttons, and admin tools that break when the restaurant outgrows them.

Mapped what guests need before they trust enough to book: clear menus, atmosphere, location, and a straight path to reserve, on mobile or desktop.

That guest lens, together with the direction agreed with the owner and manager, shaped restrained type, generous space, and photography-led layouts.

Built clear paths for menus, practical info, and BokaBord booking, short and easy to follow.

For staff: workflows for events, menus, and hours that publish to the public site only when they're ready.

Built the guest site and admin portal in code, wired booking to BokaBord, and kept staff updates in sync across both. GitHub for version control; Cursor for day-to-day design and development.

Tuned how content, images, and video are stored and served so the site stays fast under real traffic, not just on launch day.

A guest site plus a custom admin portal on a short deadline: no site builder, no big team. Brand, menus, and visual direction all had to be created in the same push, with no existing assets to lean on.

Every choice had to work for day one while leaving room to add features and scale beyond one location, without building tools staff would never use.

The main shareholder had very little time to spare and was often hard to reach. Quick check-ins were the exception, not the rhythm of the project.

To keep momentum on a tight deadline, many decisions had to be made from research, peer benchmarks, and design instinct, then brought back for validation when we did connect.

Guests want atmosphere, clear menus, and a fast path to book. Staff want simple tools to update events, menus, and hours, and control over when changes go live.

The hard part was serving both without admin complexity leaking into the public site, or brand polish getting in the way of back-office tasks.

With thousands of monthly visitors, the site had to stay fast after launch, not just look good on day one, while serving menus, images, and video under real load.

Performance became a design constraint: rich media without punishing load times on mobile.

BokaBord handles reservations well, but the handoff from the restaurant's site often feels bolted on: wrong visuals, unclear next step, CTAs that break the brand moment.

The job was making BokaBord feel native to El Portero while accepting that the booking flow itself lived outside my scope.