Project Log 003
The first one I built for someone else.
Frogtown Cafe is a family tavern on the way to the river in Pequea — the kind of place the regulars call home and everyone else drives right past. The whole thing lived on Instagram. It's the first site I've built for a client who isn't me, and it needed one thing: not a brochure, a front door.
The regulars always knew where to go. This is for the person who doesn't — yet.
The place
Frogtown Cafe has been the neighborhood's living room since 1988 — a little Marticville Road tavern in the river country of southern Lancaster County, run by Janie and a crew that's mostly been there ten or fifteen years. It has the one thing you can't build: people who love it.
What it didn't have was a website. The menu, the hours, whether the kitchen was even open that day — all of it lived on an Instagram feed. If you already followed them, you were fine. If a friend had just told you about the place, you were guessing: no menu you could read, no hours you could trust, no obvious way to the door.
What she asked for
Janie was clear about what she wanted, and — more useful — what she didn't. The menu front and center, as real text you can actually read: no PDF to pinch-and-zoom, and no prices, because a price list scares people off at the door and the board changes anyway. One page, no maze of tabs. And it had to sound like her — warm, a little funny, "everybody's welcome" — not like a corporate restaurant template.
That last one is the whole job. A place like Frogtown doesn't need to be sold; it needs to be recognized. My work was to get out of the way of the voice that already fills the room.
What I built
A single, fast page built around the moment someone first hears the name "Frogtown" and looks it up. The full menu is real HTML text — every wing sauce and stromboli, right there, no download, no prices. It's written in Janie's actual words, pulled from how she talks, not from ad copy. The photos are the ones she sent me: her crew behind the bar, the patio lit up at dusk, the food coming off the board.
A feature photo swaps itself to the weekend special every Friday and Saturday, so it's never stale. A gentle "we're closed today" note appears on Mondays and Tuesdays so nobody drives out to a locked door. Tap to call, tap for directions, hours you can count on. It's a static site — quick, cheap to run, and hers to keep — and the whole thing is her voice, not mine wearing hers.
The result
| Before — Instagram only | After — built by hand | |
|---|---|---|
| The menu | A photo in the feed, if you could find it | Real text, searchable, no prices |
| The hours | Guess, or DM and wait | Right on the page — with a "closed today" heads-up |
| The voice | Captions only her followers saw | Janie's, front and center |
| Weekend special | A post that scrolls away | Swaps itself every Fri & Sat |
| Found by a newcomer | Only if they followed first | Menu, hours, directions in one tap |
| Who owns it | Rented space in someone's app | Hers — every line, to keep |
The honest number
I'm not going to hand you an invented "traffic up 40%." Frogtown is going live now, so the real story is the plain one: it went from no front door to one — fast, in Janie's voice, and hers to keep. What the season brings, we'll measure honestly, right here.
Her regulars already knew the place by heart. The site's for the person who's about to. — Trevor, on the Frogtown build
The honest part
Same deal as everything I build. Janie owns every line of it the day it ships — the code, the photos, the words. It's hers, not licensed, not rented, not held on a platform she can't leave.
And the part most people won't say out loud: a site has to be hosted somewhere to stay online. While I host it, it stays live, fast, and current — the weekly special swap and the seasonal changes are on me. If she ever stopped and didn't move it elsewhere, it'd go dark, same as any site whose hosting lapses. But nothing is held hostage: she leaves with the whole thing, every file, ready for any host she likes. First client or hundredth, that doesn't change.
This was the first site I've built for someone who isn't me — a real local business, with real regulars and a voice worth protecting. If that's you, that's the work: the whole menu in plain sight, honest words, fast pages, photos that are actually yours — and every line of it yours to keep.
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