Design Challenge and Design Ideas

*The La Côte Restaurant is all about people and food. It gives guests a unique experience of delicious fresh seafood with a modern European influence. We started working with owners Paul and Edwina Hynes in the Summer of 2017 and at the time they were starting to win awards and getting the recognition they deserved. However their website wasn’t reflective of the high quality food and creative style of Paul Hynes as head chef. *

**Our brief can be divided into 3 main objectives;**

1. How do we marry their intense love for fresh produce, in a fine dining environment and communicate it in an engaging way on their website using best practices?

2. Design and build a website that is easily administered from the back-end and has the ability to adapt to the businesses future needs.

3. How can the website give them return on investment?

How the brief was fulfilled

*Paul and Edwina created a restaurant that is reflective of their unique skill sets and quality produce available locally and nationally. We wanted to convey their love for fresh food so we started with the ingredients and we designed a website that was the first step to experiencing the The La Côte food journey.* https://www.lacote.ie/

We managed the project deliverables and started by creating a timeline for the project’s milestones.

**Design, Build and Copywriting**
We designed and built a website that connected with the audience in a very visual way through great fresh imagery viewed in as a top down scenario allowing the viewer to imagine the dining table and browsing through the ingredients and menus. The user interface is simple and to the point; our aim was to get the user where they wanted to be in as little clicks as possible.
*Mobile responsive;* The site was designed with specific needs for both desktop and mobile in mind. Layouts change from page to page whether you are viewing in landscape or portrait giving the user a accessible experience.
*Written Content* We worked with a talented copywriter to tell the story of the restaurant and the owners love of fresh ingredients.

**CMS and future needs**
We built and developed the website using the CMS, WordPress. We then trained Edwina on how to edit and update key pages and elements of the website. By empowering La Côte they now have more flexibility and ownership of the website. The training includes a face to face 2 hour session and a customised handbook on how to carry out key tasks in the back end.

**Return on investment and website optimisation**
The website includes a booking functionality through a CRM system called Resdiary. Based on the users needs we integrated and styled the functionality. The conversion rate of the bookings increased by 70%, due to the better user experience and engagement. We also set up a voucher system that customers can buy vouchers at anytime. Previously all vouchers were hand written. Vouchers can now be automatically populated with content entered by the user and is instantly emailed as a pdf, that can be printed out. They have seen a return of almost 50% increase on voucher sales.