Web design / New Orleans, LA
A calendar nobody else uses
Fat Tuesday moves every year with Easter, landing anywhere between early February and early March, and the city’s schedule moves with it. For the stretch of parades before it, routes along St. Charles Avenue and through Mid-City close streets, Uptown businesses lose their parking, and a lot of restaurants change their hours at least once. Then come Jazz Fest at the Fair Grounds across two weekends in late April and early May, Essence Fest around the Fourth of July, and fall Sundays when the Saints play at home and the Dome empties into the CBD.
A New Orleans business website that can’t keep up with that calendar is wrong for a good part of the year. Plenty can’t. The hours were typed into a footer by whoever built the site, the menu is a PDF from two chef changes ago, and the only place a parade-day closure gets announced is Instagram, which a tourist searching Google never sees.
So the first thing we’d design is the dull part. Hours, closures and special-event notices live in a place your manager can edit from a phone in a minute, and they show up on every page that matters. The menu is real text, so it loads fast, reads on a small screen and gets picked up by search. If you run events, they sit in a list you can add to yourself, and past dates drop off on their own. Our restaurant guide gets into menus and reservations; the build itself is ordinary web design, done with this city’s calendar in mind.
Storm season belongs on the same list. After Ida in 2021, plenty of businesses were dark for days with no way to update customers except social media. A notice that someone on your team can switch on from a phone, on a page light enough to load over a weak signal, costs very little to build in at the start.
Neighborhoods first, then parishes
Locals don’t search for “New Orleans” much. They search by neighborhood, or by what’s near them: Uptown, the Irish Channel, Bywater, the Marigny, Gentilly, Lakeview. Across the river it’s Algiers, then Gretna and Marrero on the Westbank. In Jefferson Parish people say Metairie, Kenner or Harahan, and in St. Bernard Parish it’s Chalmette and Arabi.
Upriver, the River Parishes are their own world. St. Charles, St. John the Baptist and St. James parishes run along the Mississippi past refineries and chemical plants, and the contractors, welders, inspection firms and staffing companies that work those plants sell to plant managers, not tourists. Their sites need certifications, safety records described honestly and a way to request a bid, and nothing that reads like a brochure for the French Quarter. Plaquemines, down toward the Gulf, has its own mix of fishing, oil-field services and port work.
Whichever of those describes you, write the place names on your pages the way your customers say them, and use parish, never county. Our page on SEO explains how we decide which neighborhoods and parishes deserve a page and which just need naming.
How we work from away
We’re not local: there’s no New Orleans office, and the work is done remotely on Central Time. Designs come to you as links, so a manager can look one over between lunch and dinner service, and before launch your staff learn to change hours, menus and notices without us.
One New Orleans question
Can we change our hours ourselves for each parade day?
Yes, and that’s the point of how we’d build it. Your manager can post a parade-day schedule the night before, and switch back to normal hours on Ash Wednesday, without calling anyone.