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Case Study · Restaurant · Active partnership
Asian Gourmet
Two locations, one live menu.
Vietnamese-Thai cuisine across Melbourne and Palm Bay, Florida. A custom site with live SpotOn-driven menus, reservations, and TCR-approved Twilio SMS for confirmations, waitlist, and text-club promotions. Designed, built, and currently maintained by ProDesigning Creative.
At a glance
Project snapshot
2
Locations on one domain (Melbourne + Palm Bay)
Live
POS-driven menu sync (SpotOn → site)
TCR
Approved SMS campaign for confirmations / waitlist / text club
24/7
Managed hosting, security, and ongoing partnership
The challenge
A template wasn't going to cut it
Asian Gourmet runs two busy locations with overlapping-but-distinct menus. The old site was a generic restaurant template — separate contact pages for each location, a PDF menu that nobody updated, and no way for guests to book, confirm, or rejoin the waitlist from their phone. Every new promotion meant a support ticket to a web vendor in another state. Every hour the kitchen changed a special, the menu online was wrong.
The ask: one site that feels like one brand, serves two locations cleanly, pulls the menu directly from the POS, and lets the host stand know when a table is ready — without the staff having to babysit three different systems. The constraint: zero appetite for adding more software the team would have to learn. Whatever we built had to live behind the existing SpotOn POS workflow the kitchen and front-of-house already knew.
The other constraint, less visible but bigger: SMS for restaurants is no longer "just turn it on." TCR (The Campaign Registry) requirements landed in 2023 and tightened through 2024 — text messages from non-registered campaigns get filtered, throttled, or dropped outright. A reservation reminder that doesn't arrive doesn't reduce no-shows. Whatever we built had to clear TCR end-to-end, with the right brand registration, campaign use cases, and consent capture to keep delivery reliable.
What we built
Custom site, integrated end-to-end
SpotOn-driven live menus
Menu pages read directly from the SpotOn POS via authenticated API pulls. When the kitchen adds a special or 86s a dish, the site updates within minutes. No PDF uploads, no support tickets, no stale menu — and no parallel content the team has to remember to keep in sync.
Clean location switching
One URL, one brand. A location picker surfaces Melbourne or Palm Bay hours, menus, phone, and address. Google sees one domain with proper LocalBusiness schema for each location, so both locations show up correctly in their respective map packs without competing for the same listing.
Reservations with SMS reminders
Reservation form with Twilio-backed confirmation SMS and a reminder 24 hours out. We cut no-shows immediately — and we did the TCR registration paperwork up front so the messages actually deliver instead of getting silently filtered by carriers.
Waitlist that texts you
Busy nights fill fast. Guests can self-serve onto the waitlist from their phone while sitting in the parking lot — then get a text when their table's ready. The host stand gets fewer interruptions, walk-offs go down, and the room turns more cleanly during peak hours.
Text-club promotions
TCR-approved campaign lets Asian Gourmet broadcast Tuesday specials, new-menu alerts, and private-event offers to opted-in diners. Real open rates — north of 95% delivery, north of 80% read — instead of email-style 10% opens that pretend to be marketing.
Photography-forward design
Custom photography for both locations drives the home page and menu detail pages. On a category this crowded with stock photos of fried rice, real photography of the actual room, the actual chefs, and the actual food is the wedge that converts the comparison shopper into a guest.
Under the hood
Tech stack & integrations
| Layer | Stack | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Front-end | WordPress with custom theme, Tailwind utility classes, mobile-first | Fast guest-facing pages with sub-2s LCP on mobile 4G, easy ongoing content updates |
| Menu sync | SpotOn POS API → scheduled sync → on-page menu rendering | Single source of truth (the POS the kitchen already lives in) |
| SMS | Twilio Programmable Messaging, TCR brand + campaign registered | Reliable delivery for reservation, waitlist, and text-club messages |
| Reservations | Custom form → CRM webhook → SMS confirm + 24h reminder | No third-party reservation platform fees, no parallel customer data |
| Waitlist | Mobile self-service form → host-stand dashboard → Twilio SMS on "ready" | Busy-night relief without staff retraining or new POS hardware |
| Hosting | Managed enterprise hosting + Cloudflare CDN + SSL | Daily backups, security patching, uptime monitoring, peak-hour stability |
| SEO | Multi-location LocalBusiness schema, Restaurant + Menu schema, GBP alignment | Both locations rank in their respective map packs with correct hours and menus |
How it ran
Project timeline
1
Weeks 12: discovery + TCR paperwork started early
SMS campaign registration with The Campaign Registry takes 2–4 weeks of carrier review. We started that paperwork in week one — brand vetting, campaign use-case description, sample messages, double opt-in flow — so it could run in parallel with design and build instead of becoming a launch-day blocker.
2
Weeks 34: design + photography
Two design rounds reviewed in real browsers, mobile-first. Custom photography sessions at both Melbourne and Palm Bay locations during this window — food, room, chef, team. Stock photography was off the table from day one.
3
Weeks 56: build + SpotOn integration
WordPress build with custom theme, SpotOn POS API integration with menu sync, reservation and waitlist forms wired to Twilio. End-to-end tested with real reservations and real SMS sends to staff phones. TCR approval came back during this window, so we went into pre-launch with the SMS campaign already live-eligible.
4
Week 7pre-launch + redirects
Old URL inventory, redirect map for the legacy site's earned SEO, GBP alignment for both locations, schema validation in Google's Rich Results test. Soft launch to a staging URL where the management team and front-of-house could click through at their own pace.
5
Week 8cutover + first weekend
DNS cutover on a Tuesday afternoon (low traffic, full week to monitor before peak). Live verification, sitemap resubmission, and active monitoring through the first busy weekend. Reservation SMS volume ramped immediately; waitlist usage took about 30 days for guests to discover and adopt.
6
Ongoingcare, content, campaigns
Active partnership. Monthly performance reviews, seasonal menu refreshes, photography updates as the kitchen evolves the menu, text-club campaigns coordinated with the marketing calendar, performance and security checks. The site grows with the business instead of becoming a once-every-three-years rebuild.
The outcome
Staff got their nights back
Menus stay current because the POS is the source of truth. Reservations get confirmed and reminded automatically — the no-show rate dropped the first week. The waitlist SMS cut how many guests left frustrated after being told "it's about an hour." The text club runs as a monthly push, not a scramble.
A few specific changes showed up in the first 90 days post-launch:
- Menu update support tickets dropped to roughly zero. The kitchen edits items in SpotOn during prep; the site reflects within minutes. The old workflow (email a PDF to the web vendor and hope) is gone.
- No-show rate on reservations dropped meaningfully. The 24-hour reminder catches people early enough to cancel cleanly instead of just not showing up — and a clean cancel turns into a same-day rebook from the waitlist.
- The text club became the most-engaged marketing channel. SMS open and read rates dwarf email; for a business where Tuesday-night specials and last-minute open tables are real, that's the right tool.
- Both locations rank cleanly in their own map packs. No more confused Google listings, no duplicate-content penalty across location pages, no fighting over which location shows up for "Vietnamese near me."
Ongoing, we handle hosting, care, SEO, and any menu or seasonal campaign work under the partnership. Asian Gourmet focuses on the food; we handle the stack behind the site.
Client voice
In their words
Agile service, clean design with outside the box ideas to help us solve problems and grow our new book of online business! Nothing but good things to say about Derl and team! Awesome web partner!