China Tea Club is a Chinese restaurant that has been serving Canberra for 40 years. They approached Connect Your Way looking for a website that showcased that history and the restaurant itself properly, with a prominent gallery as the centrepiece.
Sean worked closely with the owner to understand how the team would actually use the site day-to-day before any code was written — which pages they would touch, how often, and who would be doing it.
The result was a clean, gallery-led design with a lightweight content workflow the team could maintain themselves without ongoing developer support.
Starting from what diners need
A restaurant website has a short list of questions to answer, and every one of them is urgent to the person asking: what is on the menu, what it costs, when the doors are open and how to book. The design starts there. The home page leads with the restaurant itself, a night photograph of the entrance in North Lyneham under the headline “Nearly forty years at Canberra’s table”, with Reserve a table and Order online as the first two things a visitor can do.
Why the gallery leads
A restaurant that has been part of Canberra for four decades has a story that is easier to show than to tell: the signboard over the door, the dining room, the dishes themselves. That is why the owner wanted the gallery as the centrepiece, and why the design gives the photographs room instead of burying them under text.
The menu is laid out the way a diner reads one, with tabs for the à la carte menu, the lunch and dinner banquets, the wine list and desserts, and each dish listed with its serving size and price.
What came next
The site has been live for over a year and the client has re-engaged Connect Your Way to plan an upgrade — adding new product categories and refreshing the visual design as the business grows.
The first piece of that upgrade is already delivered: an owner-editable admin console that lets the restaurant change its own menus, prices, photos and hours from a phone.