Case study
Paanwalla
An Indian street-food business in Naperville whose old site put its menu in a download.
What it had to do
Two audiences on one site. Walk-in customers wanting to know what is on and whether it is open, and event organisers booking catering weeks ahead. The old build served the first badly and the second not at all.
What we decided
The menu was the whole problem. It had been a download, which is the single most common and most damaging thing a food business does to its own website: unreadable on a phone without pinching, impossible to enlarge for anybody with poor eyesight, and invisible to a search engine, so the business never appeared for a dish it was known for.
The second problem was that catering was buried. Event work is worth many times a walk-in order and arrives through a completely different search, weeks earlier, from somebody comparing three suppliers. It needed its own route through the site rather than a line on a contact page.
So the menu became a page a phone can read, catering got its own path with a booking form at the end of it, and the food got a section of its own. The measurements of the old build against this one are published in full, because the numbers were the argument.
Refreshed again in September 2026: a warmer, more confident look built on the same structure, with the ordering, the phone and the directions pulled into the header on every page, WhatsApp back in the corner, the delivery platforms listed rather than hidden, and the accessibility standard stated in the footer. The structure did not need changing, which is the point of getting it right the first time.
What is on the site
A menu that is a page, not a download
Readable on a phone without pinching, enlargeable, and legible to a search engine, so dishes can be found by name.
Catering as its own journey
A separate route through the site ending in a booking form, because event enquiries arrive earlier and compare harder than walk-in trade.
Order, call, message or get directions from anywhere
Ordering, the phone and directions sit in the header on every page, with WhatsApp in the corner. Most food decisions are made on a phone, standing up, and a number you have to memorise is a number nobody rings.
Every way people already order
The order button goes to their own storefront, and DoorDash, Grubhub and Uber Eats are listed rather than fought with. People order where they already have an account.
Real food photography and their own reels
The actual dishes, and video from the stall. People choose a food business by looking at the food, and stock imagery reads instantly as not-your-food.
Built to WCAG 2.2 AA, and it says so
The footer states the standard and links an accessibility page. A restaurant site is read by people with poor eyesight in bad light more often than anyone plans for.
How it performs
- 1020 msto paint the main content, on an emulated mid-range phone
- 250 msto first byte
- 956 KBtransferred, across 43 requests
Measured 2026-10-24. Median of 3 loads, emulated mid-range phone at 390px, cold cache, waiting for the load event. For context, the median across the 300 Chicago-area small business sites we tested was 1,406 ms, and Google treats anything under 2,500 ms as good. This site is about 1.4× quicker than the local median.
Re-measured rather than remembered, which is why the date is on it.
Where it stands in search
Search Google for Paanwalla, or for paan in Naperville, and the site is in the top three — ahead of the aggregators that usually own restaurant searches. Still true after the September 2026 refresh, which is the part a redesign most often breaks.
Checked 25 September 2026. Go and run the search yourself — that is the point of putting it here. What we do not publish is the client's own traffic: those numbers are theirs, not ours to hand around.
Worth taking from this
The most valuable change was not the design. It was turning the menu from a file into a page, which took the site from invisible to findable for every dish on it.
Related
If this sounds like you
- Websites for restaurants and cafés The menu, the hours, the photographs. The four things this trade tends to get wrong online, and what to fix first.
- Web design in Naperville This is where the studio is. Not a service area on a map — the actual address. What is different about building for businesses here.
Every site, not just this one
What this client got without asking
Every site we build now gets all of this, whichever plan it is on. Most of it is invisible until it is missing.
- Works on whatever they are holding Checked on a phone, a tablet and a desktop, down to the narrow screen of a folding phone. Not shrunk to fit: laid out so it reads properly at each size.
- Readable by the AI assistants people now ask More people start with ChatGPT or a search assistant than with a search box. The words on the page are plain text an assistant can read and quote, rather than something it has to run to see, and the site tells them it is welcome.
- Built to recognised accessibility guidelines We follow WCAG 2.2 AA, the standard most of the world writes into law. That means it works by keyboard, the text can be enlarged without the layout breaking, colours stay readable, and photographs are described for anyone who cannot see them. We follow the guidelines and test against them; we do not sell a certificate, because nobody can honestly certify this.
- Looks right in daylight and at night Where it suits the brand, the site follows the light or dark setting on the visitor's own device, and offers a switch for anyone who prefers the other one.
- Fast on a bad signal The pages are small and there is very little for the phone to do before it can show them, which is what matters in a van or a car park rather than on office wifi.
- Looks right when somebody shares it Paste a link into WhatsApp, LinkedIn or a text and a proper card appears with the right title and picture, rather than a bare address.