A menu that changed weekly, on a site that couldn’t keep up
A full rebuild for a seasonal-menu restaurant whose old site needed a developer on call every Sunday night — replaced with something the owner updates herself in about four minutes.
- Client
- Fernwood Kitchen
- Role
- Design, build, CMS setup
- Timeline
- Six weeks
- Deliverables
- Site, editable menu system, staff training
The brief
Fernwood's menu changes with what's actually in season — sometimes weekly, sometimes with 48 hours' notice when a supplier call changes what's available. Their old site had the menu hard-coded into the page templates, so every change meant emailing a developer, waiting a day or two, and hoping it went live before the item sold out.
They didn't need a prettier site. They needed to stop being a bottleneck in their own kitchen.
Constraints
- No budget for a custom app — had to work inside WordPress, which they already knew how to log into
- The owner is not technical and wouldn't remember a complicated process used twice a year
- Site needed to stay fast even with the menu changing constantly, since most orders come from mobile during service hours
The old site's real problem wasn't the design. It was that changing a single price meant becoming a temporary client of a web developer.
What I did
Structure first. Rebuilt the menu as a proper custom post type instead of hand-coded HTML, with categories, a simple price field, and a toggle for "sold out today" that hides an item without deleting it.
The editing experience. Spent as much time on the admin screen as the public one — a menu item takes four fields and one photo, no page builder, no confusion about which template controls what.
Training, not just building. Sat with the owner for twenty minutes after launch and watched her update a real item live, rather than handing over a document she'd never read.
How it came together
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01
Audit and discovery Watched the old update process happen once, start to finish, before writing a line of code — the real problem wasn't visible in the old site's design, only in how painful it was to touch.
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02
Building the editable structure Menu items became their own content type instead of static page content, with fields simple enough that "add a photo, type a price" is the whole job.
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03
The training session that almost got skipped Nearly delivered this as "here's a document," until deciding a live twenty-minute walkthrough was worth more than any amount of written instructions — this turned out to be the actual reason it stuck.
The outcome
The owner updated the menu herself for the first time four days after launch, without asking a single question. Average time to publish a menu change went from "a day or two, if I remembered to email" to under five minutes.
"I didn't realize how much I'd been avoiding updating the site until it stopped being a whole production." — Owner, Fernwood Kitchen
Built with
- WordPress
- Advanced Custom Fields
- Figma