Where We Started

Tristan trained at one of Italy's most respected culinary institutes. He's cooked in a kitchen that has since earned two Michelin stars. He's spent years building a career most people only dream about.

He also built his own Squarespace website to launch Plated Kitchen. It worked. The business grew. And as it grew, the gaps between what the website could handle and what the business actually needed started to show. Not because he'd done anything wrong. Because that's how growth works. You don't know what you don't know until the business gets big enough to show you.

He knew it was time to bring someone in.

The Conversations That Changed the Project

Early on, Tristan mentioned something almost in passing. There was no system for subscribers to choose their weekly meals. They had to remember on their own, or catch the right post on social media before the window closed. It sounded like a small thing. It wasn't.

People too busy to cook are often too busy to decide what they want to eat. That was the part nobody had built for yet.

That realization led to the weekly menu system we built into the website, which I'll get into below. But there was a second layer to the same problem. Even with a better reminder in place, some weeks people still wouldn't choose, whether they forgot, got busy, or just didn't feel like deciding that day. So we built a Chef's Choice default directly into checkout. If a subscriber hasn't chosen by the cutoff, Tristan simply picks for them. No missed week, no gap in their delivery, nothing for the customer to feel bad about forgetting.

The serving size structure was similar. He'd built pricing around two-person households because that's who the first customers were. It made complete sense at the time. But as the business grew, so did the range of people trying to order, and families of three, four, five, and six weren't sure if this business was geared to them. We rebuilt it so households of up to six could actually order.

This is the part I love most about this work. A website project becomes a real conversation about how the business actually runs, and sometimes the most useful thing I can offer isn't a design decision. It's just asking the question that growth has made visible.

Building What the Website Actually Needed

Most of my work lives in service-based businesses. Coaches, consultants, practitioners, people whose websites need to sell their expertise, not a checkout cart. Plated Kitchen needed both. Customers aren't just reading about Tristan's training and his food, they're choosing a plan, picking a serving size, and checking out the way they would on any product page. That meant building real product pages into a site that still had to feel personal and founder-led, not like a faceless online store.

The weekly menu system was the piece that solved more than one problem at once. I designed it using Squarespace's blog feature, so Tristan spends about three minutes each week writing a short post about that week's menu. That single post does several things automatically. It updates the homepage. It builds a growing archive that doubles as an SEO asset. And it can also double as a post that he can share to his email list with a couple of manual clicks.

For subscribers, that email is the reminder that used to not exist. It lands in their inbox at the right time, so choosing their meals, or letting Chef's Choice take over, is no longer something they have to remember entirely on their own. For his one-time order customers, the same email solves a different problem. They no longer have to go hunting through social media to find out what's on the menu that week. It's just there, waiting in their inbox, an easy invitation to order again.

Before this project, Tristan wasn't emailing his client list. I set up his Squarespace email campaigns from scratch, connected his customer list, and got the system running so that three-minute weekly post is genuinely all it takes for the email to go out. Then I recorded a set of training videos walking him through how to send future campaigns himself, so he's never stuck waiting on me to get a menu out the door.

What Happened After Launch

Before this project, Plated Kitchen was nowhere on Google search.

After we connected Google Search Console and built SEO into every page and every weekly post from the ground up, his Squarespace website moved into the first three search results for the searches that actually matter to his business. Four days after launch, he was already showing up as the first result recommended by AI.

People looking for what Tristan offers can now find him, whether they're searching the old fashioned way or asking AI to point them in the right direction.

Why I Work This Way

Most business owners I work with are on their own. There's no colleague down the hall who understands their pricing, their process, their customers the way they do. I'm not a chef. I don't know the first thing about running a professional kitchen. But I know what it looks like when a business has outgrown the systems holding it together, and I know how to ask the questions that make the next version possible.

Tristan didn't just get a website. He got someone in his corner who cared enough to keep asking why, until the why actually made sense for his business and not just for mine.

That's what done-with-you means to me.