Web design / Richmond, VA
Start with the menu
Someone standing on Cary Street, trying to decide where to eat, taps a restaurant’s link and gets a PDF. It was laid out for a printed menu, so they pinch, zoom, scroll sideways, lose their place and walk two doors down instead. Richmond takes its food seriously, and a surprising number of good kitchens here still lose customers exactly this way.
A menu should be a web page. Plain text, prices if you publish them, dietary notes, and a line saying when it was last updated. We build restaurant sites in Framer, so whoever writes the specials can change the menu from a laptop in five minutes without calling anyone. Our restaurant guide goes further into reservations, private events and the photos that are worth paying for.
Taprooms, cideries and the label on the can
Scott’s Addition filled up with taprooms and cideries over the last decade or so, and most of them did their branding in a hurry: a can label first, a logo pulled out of the label, a website assembled later by whoever had time. The result is a site that looks like it belongs to a different company from the cans in the fridge.
This is a city that trains a lot of art directors (VCU’s arts school and its Brandcenter are both here), so people notice when the type on the sign doesn’t match the type online. If you’re opening something new, do the brand identity first and let the site grow out of it. If you’re established and only the mark is weak, a focused logo design project can fix that without throwing out everything else.
The counties aren’t Richmond, except in the mail
Richmond is an independent city, separate from Henrico and Chesterfield. But the post office doesn’t care: a business in Short Pump or Glen Allen often has “Richmond” on its mailing address, and so does Capital One’s huge West Creek campus, which actually sits out in Goochland County. Locals know the difference. When they want something close, they search Midlothian, Mechanicsville or Short Pump, not Richmond.
So a Henrico business whose site names only “Richmond” undersells itself, and confuses a customer in Chester who wants to know if you’ll drive down. Name the places you actually serve, starting with the one you’re in.
Firms that sell to the state
Capitol Square brings its own economy: consultants, lobbyists, lawyers and associations whose busiest stretch is the General Assembly session each winter. Add the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond and Dominion Energy’s headquarters, and there’s a steady market of firms selling expertise to institutions. Their sites should read like a good briefing memo. Short paragraphs, specific experience, named people, and a direct way to book time. That’s straightforward web design, and most of it is cutting.
Working from a distance
We work remotely, without a Richmond office, and book calls on Eastern Time for the quiet stretch after lunch, not the middle of a rush. A cook can check a design round on the line between tickets. Once the site is live, the manager gets a session on changing the menu, the hours and the events page.
A Richmond question
Should a new brewery do the branding and the website at the same time?
Ideally the brand comes a little ahead, since the can, the taproom sign and the site all need the same name, mark and colors. But they can overlap. Once the logo and type are settled, the site can be designed while labels are at the printer, so you aren’t opening the doors with a placeholder page.