New Website System for Ethan Stowell Restaurants
Client Introduction
Ethan Stowell Restaurant Group (ESR) is a Washington-based collection of upscale restaurants. Some of their brands have multiple locations, and the organization has plans to expand into new areas of Washington and other major US cities.
Problem
ESR’s legacy website was no longer meeting the evolving needs of their business. As the number of their restaurants had grown, the need for a map of restaurant locations became clear, and with pandemic-related changes to the restaurant industry, the need for guests to effortlessly find an online ordering portal was high.
The website editing experience for CMS users was difficult, and the restaurant group’s online presence did not match the guest experience in their physical locations.
Solution
Designing and developing a unified website system in the headless CMS Sanity Studio: ethanstowellrestaurants.com
The website’s features include a map of restaurant locations powered by Mapbox and Algolia, a customized content management experience for restaurant managers, and three satellite websites for ESR restaurant brands with multiple locations.
The website's content is treated like data, so restaurant managers are able to make a change in one plage – updating a menu item for example – and that change is reflected in all of the places where a restaurant property's menu is populated – the main ESR site, the individual restaurant's satellite site, the happy hour menu collection, and so on.
Impact & Outcomes
My role on this project was Account & Project Manager. I organized tasks, led meetings when necessary, and took notes that defined new features or changes to the website’s design. The development phase of the project lasted around ten months, and we met with the client weekly to review progress, present work and gather feedback. Each month I reviewed the previous month’s out of scope changes to the project and indicated when the client should be billed time that was outside of the project’s scope. The project drove around $170k of revenue for the agency.
The client and their internal team are delighted with the new websites aesthetically and functionally, so much so that the websites had barely been launched before our team was asked to create a fifth site for another ESR satellite property.
The client’s testimonial is “This site kicks ass!”