Digital Marketing Portfolio – BJ’s Carolina Cafe Website Redesign

BJ’s Carolina Café is a locally owned restaurant located in Jarvisburg, NC. The restaurant’s owner approached Mitro Digital Marketing about helping maintain his website. BJ’s owner was starting to rebrand the company, having inherited it from his father, and he wanted this to carry over to the website as well. 

After taking a look at their website, we realized that the site was in a bit of disarray; the URL structure was odd, and the site’s theme was running on a very old version of PHP. It was then that we seriously started considering a new build for their website.

The first thing we did after getting access was transfer the website to our dedicated hosting. Once there, we discovered several major compatibility issues with the site’s outdated theme. Many of the integral features (such as the image slider on the home page) were dependent upon the theme, which we could not replace without redesigning the whole site. This required our senior development team to downgrade to a PHP version compatible with what the site was built on for the time being, since the company that created the theme no longer supported it.

Once all of that was out of the way, we began maintaining the website by providing plugin updates and site maintenance. During this time we consulted with the clients about what they were looking for with their redesign, where they confirmed that it was in the company’s best interest to build a new site from scratch.

The theme we were looking to build would be primarily focused on the home page, with a few auxiliary pages, such as a full menu, a blog, and a contact page. The home page features a reviews carousel, a compact navigable menu, and two image galleries, all of which are powered with JavaScript that our developer built from scratch. The page also includes an expandable row of events that is built with pure CSS.

Once the site matched the mockup, our development team made the whole site mobile responsive and added some helpful plugins to it. We presented the finished website to the client and made minor revisions as necessary. 

We migrated the site to the newly branded, already purchased domain and performed some minor final checks before connecting it to Google Analytics. We also redirected the old domain to the new one through the DNS records. Since then, we have continued doing regular maintenance on the new website, and the client has been quite happy with the end result.