Francesco's Ristorante & Pizzeria
Website Redesign for a Local Italian Restaurant
Project Overview
Francesco's is a family-run Italian restaurant and pizzeria in Maitland, FL, with a genuinely compelling story — a Sicilian-trained chef, a wood-fired kitchen, a menu built from scratch daily. None of that came through on the restaurant's existing website, which ran on a generic, dated template: thin content, no visual identity connected to the business, no pricing, navigation scattered across eight disconnected pages.
Rather than pitch cold, I built the redesign first. Showing up with a finished, working site says more than a deck ever could.
The Approach
Full redesign — design, content strategy, and development — built solo to show what a real engagement with this business would look like before ever approaching them.
- Full 7-page site: Home, Our History, Our Menu, Wine List, Reservations, Catering & Group Dining, and Contact
- Complete visual identity — two full design directions explored
- Content strategy: faithful business data, rewritten narrative copy
- Self-hosted variable fonts and a CSS-only, no-build architecture
See It Live
Design Process
The first version leaned editorial: a deep indigo palette built around a hand-drawn majolica ceramic-tile motif referencing the chef's Palermo roots — a deliberate departure from the "warm cream, terracotta, serif" look most Italian restaurant sites default to.
I later repositioned the entire visual identity toward a warmer, more traditional trattoria feel: deep wine red and burgundy, parchment cream, walnut brown, with a red-and-white checkered gingham motif standing in for the ceramic tiles — while keeping the same typographic system and technical foundation underneath. Reworking the full palette and decorative system without touching the underlying structure was a good test of how modular the build actually was.
Typography is Fraunces, a high-contrast variable serif, paired with Libre Franklin. Both are self-hosted as inlined variable fonts rather than linked externally — no third-party font requests, clean under a strict content security policy.
What I Built
Single-File Architecture
The full 7-page site, mirroring the original's structure, built as one self-contained HTML file with a lightweight hash-based router. No framework, no build step.
Light & Dark Mode
The entire site supports both light and dark mode through CSS custom properties, with menu categories switching via CSS-only tabs.
Content Strategy
Factual business data — the full menu (roughly 70 items), a 32-bottle wine list, hours, and catering pricing — carried over faithfully. Authored content like the chef's bio and tasting notes were rewritten from scratch.
Licensed Photography
Rather than reuse the restaurant's existing photos without knowing who held the rights, I sourced five properly Creative Commons-licensed stock photos, each credited to its photographer, as placeholders for real photography.
Self-Hosted Fonts
Fraunces and Libre Franklin, inlined as variable fonts rather than linked externally, so the site makes no third-party font requests and stays clean under a strict CSP.
No Build Step
Static HTML/CSS/JS, iterated privately and deployed live for a shareable link — no bundler, no framework overhead for a site this size.