Turtle Bread

Turtle Bread has been baking in Minneapolis since 1994, across three neighbourhoods. Their website was a single WordPress page. Simple, and hard to use on a phone.

I noticed it and got in touch.

Within the first week of working together their site went down. It was not a quick fix.

People kept showing up at the wrong shop.

Three locations, three sets of hours, three kitchens that stop serving at different times. The old site treated them as one thing, so people turned up at the wrong neighbourhood or arrived after the kitchen had closed.

The map listings made it worse. Stores were showing as closed when they weren't, and Harvey heard about it from customers.

Harvey wanted less than I proposed, and he was right.

I came in with a bigger idea. A page per location, a menu per location, the works. Harvey's answer was that simplicity was the entire point. People already get confused about which shop is which, so don't hand them more to read.

So I cut it back. Four pages. One general menu covering what's always there, with a clear note to call the shop for anything specific, because specifics change.

To make three locations read as three, each one got its own image shape and size across desktop and tablet. You can see they're different places before you read a word.

I pushed harder on the food photography too. A bakery site that doesn't make you hungry isn't doing its job.

On colour I brought three options: maroon, dark brown and a mustard gold. Harvey cut brown straight away. In food, brown doesn't read as clean.

Marnie, the manager, had a separate problem. Holiday orders, pies and quiches, live on a paper pamphlet at the counter. I built a CMS for the seasonal menu so she can change it herself, and we're working through the handover so she never needs me for it.