Rommel's Catering

Rommel’s has catered New Orleans events for more than 35 years, and its Wix site undersold it. The family already had its best asset, which was their food photography. So the design steps back and lets the photos sell. The hand-drawn logo stayed, because people already know it.

There was no footage for a hero. Stock video would have shown someone else’s food. So I turned the family’s own photos into clips with Higgsfield, and the first thing a visitor sees is a dish Rommel’s actually served.

A caterer’s menu is never finished. Prices move, dishes rotate, and the holiday menus change every year. Across four menus, that is 277 dishes, and the family could not be waiting on me to change one.

So I built them a custom CMS: a private admin only the family can sign into, made for the things they actually change. Editing a dish is filling in a form, and nobody needs to know how the site is built or hosted.

• Menus. A new menu gets its own page and a place in the navigation, so a holiday menu never needs a developer.

• Gallery. Photos shrink before they upload, so the family can post straight from a phone.

• Quote requests. Every one is emailed and saved to one board, so no lead depends on an inbox.

It runs on the Cloudflare account that hosts the site, with nothing metered, so there is no hosting bill.

The old Wix addresses redirect to their new pages, so the search ranking the old site earned carries over. Every dish renders in the page itself, where search engines can read it. Lighthouse scores the site 100 for accessibility, SEO and best practices, and 95 to 98 for performance on desktop.

It is too early for traffic numbers. What changed is that the family updates a menu the day it changes, without calling anyone.