History:
Brooklyn Crab and I have a long history. Brooklyn Crab is a seafood restaurant located in Brooklyn, NY. I built a website for the restaurant when they first opened back in 2010 using WordPress. The first website was fun, a bit kitschy, a little rough around the edges. The main focus was a photo gallery and blog that followed the restaurant from construction to launch.
Redesign:
The restaurant is now fully established and booming. I worked closely with the wonderful people at Brooklyn Crab to redesign their website in 2016 to better fit their current needs. We chose to move from WordPress to Squarespace to ensure that the site would keep a consistent professional, clean and branded appearance while allowing non-web-savvy staff more control over very specific sections that need occasional updating. The new site design was chosen to better showcase photos of the restaurant’s tantalizing seafood and drink specials. We also wanted to ensure that customers looking for quick information about the restaurant – hours, directions, menu selections – coulc quickly and easily find these answers. We wanted the site to be fast and pretty on all mobile devices. And lastly, we worked closely with Reservation Genie to offer robust reservation forms for large parties using Brooklyn Crab for their events.
Research:
To make sure the team understood the changes we were discussing, I set up a demo site on Squarespace for the Brooklyn Crab staff to play with and get comfortable with before we made the final decision to leave WordPress.
I also assisted the team in a robust research project to find the right reservations platform to suit their needs. We looked at paid platforms and WordPress plugins. Our goal was to find a platform that was affordable, clean and easy to use, customizable to suit the crab shack’s specific reservation needs, and that could be easily embedded into our website. Reservation Genie has proven to be the right decision for us as well as a great partner.
Inner Workings:
Brooklyn Crab’s website used the Squarespace Template “Marquee“, I personally love the 3D parallax scrolling. Photos are crisp and clean without slowing down the site; galleries open in lightbox. Hosting is through SquareSpace.
As of 2020 management has changed at Brooklyn Crab and the restaurant has redesigned their site again using another developer. The restaurant continues to grow and I wish them all success. An archive of the many website iterations can be found at the Internet Archive WayBackMachine.