La Bohemia
Website for an authentic Chilean café & bar to move beyond a social-only presence. Task-first IA with WIX plugins for online orders, reservations, and menus, built for owner autonomy and local SEO from day one.
La Bohemia is an authentic Chilean café & bar in Melbourne's south-east, a family business built on culture, quality, and community, hosting events and live Latin music weekly. Starting as a sandwich shop and evolving into a full restaurant and bar over a decade, their reputation was strong but their digital presence was limited entirely to social media. The challenge was designing and building a website that improves the pre-visit experience, surfaces the three core tasks customers need, see menus, book a table, order online, and gives the owners full autonomy to update it themselves.
La Bohemia had no website, only social media. Potential customers had no reliable way to see menus, make reservations, or place online orders without calling or messaging directly. The owners, a mother and son duo managing a busy venue, needed a solution they could maintain independently, without technical resource. The brief: build a simple, task-first site that closes the gap between social discovery and on-site action.
Competitor analysis benchmarked three local restaurants selected on cuisine specialisation, location proximity, and online presence: Citrico Cocina (Latin American, inner-city), Pyramids Restaurant & Café (African, same suburb), and Maple Leaf Malaysian Restaurant (same suburb, 30+ year local). WIX was assessed against Weebly and Squarespace across ease of use, design/customisation, plugins, e-commerce, SEO, support, and pricing, selected for its plugin ecosystem and owner-friendly maintenance.
The process moved from competitor analysis through IA definition, wireframing, design system development, and WIX configuration, with owner autonomy as the primary constraint shaping every decision. Platform selection happened early and deliberately, before a single wireframe was drawn.
A WIX site built around three primary tasks surfaced on every page, Order, Book, Menus, with a warm, culturally-grounded design system and a plugin stack the owners can manage independently. Every decision prioritised clarity and owner autonomy over complexity.
A task-first website that connects the dots between social discovery and on-site action, menus visible, bookings self-serve, orders online. Owners can update menus and promotions independently, with a baseline in place for local SEO and EDM-driven campaigns.
This was a pragmatic build: prioritise tasks, choose tools the owners can maintain, and keep the design warm but uncluttered. The WIX stack provided the right balance of capability and simplicity for a small family business with no in-house technical resource. The key design decision was keeping three primary actions above the fold on every page, making the site work for customers who know exactly what they want before they arrive. If I were to revisit it, I'd invest more time in photography art direction, food imagery was the biggest variable in perceived quality across all three competitors.