(Design breakdown)Hospitality
A neighbourhood café is chosen on a phone, usually while walking, so the whole site has to work with a thumb before it works with a mouse.
Café / Thumb-first
A neighbourhood café and small roastery built thumb-first — every item photographed as one consistent shoot, and a tray that follows you between pages.
(What was decided, and why)
01
Every item is photographed under the same lighting and framing rather than assembled from whatever images existed, because a menu that looks shot in five different sessions reads as improvised.
Compare any three items on the live menu — same crop, same light.
02
An order-in-progress tray persists across every page rather than resetting on navigation, so browsing the menu never risks losing what’s already been chosen.
Add an item on the live site, then navigate to a different page — the tray is still there.
03
An earlier version of this piece’s presentation put the live site inside a phone-frame graphic to literally show the thumb-first claim. At real size the phone occupied a third of the frame and the rest read as empty space — cut in favour of the desktop capture filling its frame with the actual work.
This is a decision about how the piece is DISPLAYED on Thornbury’s own site, not about the café site itself — compare against the phone-frame approach still used elsewhere in the industry.
(By the numbers)
Captured live from the actual deployment on 2026-08-26 — Lighthouse scores, not estimates. Re-run it yourself against the live link below and it should read close to this.
SEO reads 69 for the domain-level noindex reason explained above, common to every piece in this catalogue.