Client Overview

Mother's Deli & Bakery

Mother’s Deli & Bakery is a family-run local food business offering hot prepared foods, catering, holiday specials, and a school lunch program. While the business has a strong presence in their local community, its website had not been updated since 2017 and is unable to effectively showcase their business objectives

Background

Helping a community-oriented business succeed

I proactively initiated client outreach to share insights from an academic content audit. This created an opportunity to implement design and content revisions to their website.

Project Goals

The audit revealed significant opportunities to:

Improve website usability, clarity, and accuracy
Increase findability and SEO performance
Reduce content redundancy and outdated information
Create clearer paths for users to understand services and take action

Research & Methods

Using heuristic evaluation to identify key business goals

Evaluation of the current website revealed local community engagement as a prominent business objective. Showcased by the business' key School Lunch Program Service, they highlight initiatives working with local school boards and fundraising effort to feed their community.

Content inventory analysis revealed key pain points

After evaluating URL structures, header hierarchy, metadata, navigation patterns, and page-level content, crawl data revealed significant pain points regarding service findability, usability, and content accuracy. This identified two key areas for improvement: CTA's and content hierarchy

Audit Findings

Overcrowded navigation obscured key service categories

Key service pages were miscategorized under a “Menu” navigation label, creating unclarity around the types of services offered. Unnecessary sub-navigation added extra steps to the user journey, while services were buried within dropdown menus. These issues increased cognitive load and made it more difficult for users to efficiently locate and access key services.

Unclear CTAs fail to inform users on service information and clear next steps

This business provides 3 distinct services: Catering, Holiday Specials, and a School Lunch Program. However, lack of clear or consistent instructions on how to place orders, with key information scattered across multiple sections and pages. In some cases, call-to-actions conflicted with one another, including invalid order forms and instruction redundancies

Unreliable content impacts site credibility and visual information intake

The website contains several instances of outdated, inconsistent, and redundant content, including misaligned menus details and duplicated page content. Many pages use indistinct URL paths, making it difficult for search engines and users to differentiate between sections, highlighting a need for content consistency and structured hierarchy

Design Recommendations

Turning audit insights into actionable design changes

The focus is to reduce friction and create a more intuitive user experience by simplifying navigation, clarifying content structure, and implementing clear CTA's

Establishing clear structural and visual hierarchy

Grouping Services: Implement new "Services" parent category in navigation. Group service pages into a consolidated dropdown housing sub-pages for Catering Menu, Holiday Specials, and the School Lunch Program

Concrete Structure Hierarchy: Ensure every page has a clear H1 tag with supporting CTAS. A proposed task flow introduces "Order Now" or "Inquire Now" buttons on every service page to provide a clear, linear path for users to complete their goals. Structure service page information into:

What’s offered
How to order
What to expect

Revising Duplicated Content: Showcase more aspects of the family-run business, such as "behind the scenes" shots or photos of popular menu items, to align content to business values