Website rebuild and second-venue launch for an Italian restaurant brand

An Italian restaurant brand inside a Cheshire pub group was opening its second site. The existing website was a single hand-coded HTML file built for one location. It could not represent two venues, the menus were hard-coded so every price change needed a developer, there was no way to stage a phased opening, and nothing was measured.

The launch itself was not one job but eight running in parallel: a teaser campaign, a waitlist mechanic, a community preview, a press dinner, influencer outreach, printed menus, in-venue WhatsApp, and a booking platform that offered no webhooks. The opening date then moved twice while the build was in progress.

The site was rebuilt on Astro as a thirteen-page multi-venue build, deploying on every push. Menus moved into structured data, and a content management system was wired in on top so the team edit their own menus, prices, offers, FAQs and homepage tiles through a browser. No developer, no ticket, no waiting.

The launch mechanics were built to absorb change rather than resist it. A single launch flag flips the entire site from "register your interest" to "book a table" across every surface: homepage, venue page, footer, booking picker and navigation. When the opening date moved, twice, neither change cost more than one line and a push.

Underneath it, the measurement layer: GA4 and Tag Manager with Google Consent Mode v2 and a cookie consent gate, with the third-party reservations widget wired into the same container so booking interactions are visible rather than disappearing into someone else's iframe. Alongside that, a self-hosted webfont stack, structured data, sitemap and an accessibility statement written to WCAG 2.1 AA.

The email system was rebuilt from scratch: a new audience, automatic signup from the site, and a signed-token one-click unsubscribe running as a serverless function. Diagnosing why signups had never been landing turned up the cause, an API key with permission to send but not to manage the list.

Then the work either side of the build. Photography and video on site through the launch period, the teaser and opening campaign itself, and a seventy-six page brand bible that consolidated five conflicting sets of guidelines into one source of truth, delivered as both a web portal and a print-ready document.

The second venue opened with a website that could carry it, a booking funnel measurable end to end, and a client able to run their own menus and prices without a developer in the loop. The two date changes that would normally trigger a scramble across every page were absorbed in a single line of configuration each time.

The same brand now runs both venues from one system, one set of guidelines and one measurement setup, which is what makes the third venue a repeat of a process rather than a rebuild.

Launch reach, press coverage and booking figures are being compiled and will be added here.