Cottage Inn Pizza Carryout & Delivery, Inc. is a local Midwest favorite, home to 50 franchise stores in Michigan and Ohio. Serving gourmet pizza with Greek and Italian favorites, Cottage Inn’s pizza is perfectly prepared without skimping on the quality of their ingredients.
Cottage Inn Pizza is the standard for gourmet pizza in Michigan, and their unrivaled pies needed a website that could capture each delicious bite. After having some initial difficulty in finding an agency, we were the ranch to their breadsticks. They were also looking for a partner they could trust: a team to guide them down the right path in terms of best practices, upcoming trends, and how to achieve their goals.
With our partnership established, we went to work on their website, first conducting User Experience (UX) and Information Architecture (IA) testing. With their broad user base of parents of kids soccer teams to corporate boardrooms, we made sure to focus primarily on clear usability and accessibility to get users where they needed to go.
Increase in Pageviews
Decrease in Bounce Rate
Increase in Sessions per User
With our design process fully squared away, our developers dug into building the site. Our focus on usability wasn’t only on the front-end, but on the back-end as well to allow for their internal team to make quick, easy updates.
To exemplify the quality of the pizza, we opted for a visual experience that makes stomachs rumble. With large product and ingredient photos, the user is given an engaging experience that reinforces Cottage Inn Pizza’s gourmet reputation. This is especially evident on the menu product pages to bring more interactivity for customers to browse through toppings, sides, DipInn cups, and any other add-ons.
With the scope of this build, we made sure to have open-lines of communication in our dev team. With multiple hands on the project, we ensured there was a clear code repository with notes to contextualize everything that was written to not only make the build simple within the initial phases, but to future-proof it for easy updates in the years to come.
With our visual menu updates, it was time to move into considerations that made browsing the menu intuitive. To help pizza lovers find their dream gourmet pie, we created a sticky sidebar navigation on the Menu page. On the desktop version, the sticky navigation helps visitors see the entire Cottage Inn Pizza menu listings; therefore, enticing users to learn more and potentially order sides, along with pizza. It’s easily nested away as well, so the user can focus in on the information at hand
Custom Menu Builder
We created a robust menu plugin that integrates a custom post type to allow the Cottage Inn Pizza internal team to quickly and easily edit their menu items. It also allows new content meta boxes to arrange their products in a drag-and-drop interface, resulting in a responsive, customized menu page. This allows employees that aren’t familiar with code to make necessary updates, reducing stress on their team.
Want to figure out how much pizza to order for a given event? Here’s the solution: the Pizza Calculator. We created a pizza calculator to help hungry visitors decide how many pizzas they’ll need prior to placing their orders. The calculator allows the visitor to select the number of adults and children they will be feeding.
Once you enter your headcount, it’ll suggest the number of large pizzas to order. If the user’s party of pizza lovers are extra hungry, check the box and it’ll increase the number of pizzas to order — since you would always rather have leftovers than hungry partygoers!
A Cheesy Relationship
As we boxed up and sent out the site, there was even more opportunity left on the table. With a rewards program integration, SEO, PPC ads, and beyond, our teams are blending together like the finest of mozzarella mixes as we cook up new features and marketing opportunities for our partner.
