Cluck Brothers, Nottingham

Evolving as many businesses did when lockdown hit, Cluck Brothers changed their business from a bricks & mortar location to a mobile chicken truck operating out of supermarket and pub car parks! They have been wildly successful due to their excellent chicken and relentless puns, adding more and more venues since setting up.

Design

With excellent branding already in place, we created a focused web design to show upcoming collection points and focus visitors towards the order page. Keeping things simple was the brief and this was highlighted by a few tweaks being required post launch. With the business aiming at everyone, we saw a wide range of IT skills and it had to be as easy as possible to order.

The site of course works on mobiles and tablets as all our sites do, with no separate mobile version or app required.

WordPress website build

Once the designs were sorted, we converted it into our fast loading WordPress theme. We make our own to keep things as clean as possible and avoid any yearly fees for theme updates. It also avoid the sadly common situation where theme authors stop work on their theme, leaving website owners high and dry and having to rebuild their sites.

Our lightweight page builder means it’s easy to create nice looking pages with a variety of content, rather than big blocks of text.

Our page builder makes it easy to lay our your text and images

WooCommerce

This was the most complex part of the project – the ordering system. We tried a variety of WooCommerce ordering plugins and came up against some interesting questions. Do we let people order first and then choose a location, or choose the location first? How do we manage upcoming locations? How do we make this easy for the business owner to use? Happily we found a suitable plugin and modified the templates to fit the site design, avoiding costly custom development for the ordering system.

Payment gateways were also a challenge on this project. Salespeople will tell us anything to get the sale, but functionality and support vary wildly between companies. Many gateways are just rebadged products from other companies too! With there being a need for a point of sale (POS) system for the actual food truck, the client settled on Square as they offered a good terminal and have a solid WooCommerce plugin for their online payment gateway.

Updates & Changes

As with all websites, it’s necessary to keep things up to date for security and performance reasons. With the site being so complex, we left the development site online so we can test out updates and changes there to avoid downtime on the live site. Changes to font licensing meant we had to change the header font recently, which again was done without any disruption.

Find out more about our WordPress update service

Summary

This was a fun and technically challenging project and it was great to help the Cluck Brothers prosper despite various lockdowns. If you need a custom designed WordPress or WooCommerce website, feel free to give us a call on 01636 812551 or contact us for a chat.