Our Approach
The idea was to develop a website for the gastronomy sector — more specifically for a café — that we can present to potential clients as a sample project. The goal was to demonstrate how a website for a gastronomy business can be structured and designed. We started by planning the basic layout of the website in Excalidraw. Planning the homepage alone took around 45 minutes. The time investment came primarily from the need to develop a sensible page structure, initial ideas for the design and colour scheme, and decisions around which placeholders to use and where to source suitable images. The planned layout was then implemented using Next.js and Tailwind CSS. We chose Next.js in part because the framework supports Server-Side Rendering (SSR) and offers built-in image optimisation capabilities. The effort involved in our own portfolio projects is generally higher than it might appear, as content and design decisions are not provided by a client. Instead, we have to determine ourselves which content makes sense, which structure suits the target audience, and how the individual sections should be presented. The images used were sourced from Pexels and used in accordance with the applicable licence terms. In terms of design, we deliberately avoided animated highlights and transitions in order to create a calm impression. Feedback, suggestions or ideas for improvement are welcome at [email protected].
Why This Kind of Project?
We developed this project for demonstration purposes within the gastronomy sector, as this industry is directly part of our target audience. It allows us to show potential clients exactly how such a website can be structured and designed. Even as a portfolio project, it goes through a large part of the same processes that apply to a client project. Including planning, development, testing, deployment, and ongoing management via Plesk and Cloudflare, as well as various internal workflows. Despite the possibilities offered by AI today, this still requires a meaningful time investment. We use AI where it can support us effectively and reduce workload. However, the technical implementation and the decisions behind it are based on our own requirements and experience — not on AI-generated direction. To an outside viewer, the finished project may appear relatively straightforward. A more extensive project — for example, one featuring a custom dashboard and additional management functions would certainly be interesting from a technical and demonstrative standpoint. At the same time, it would significantly increase the development effort and extend the project timeline. Since this is a portfolio project, we made a deliberate decision to focus its scope on the areas most relevant to demonstrating a gastronomy website. This allows us to represent the use case realistically while delivering a complete project — without investing substantial additional effort into features that are not required for the project's intended purpose.
