No Reservations for Always Hungry’s New Site

When the team from Always Hungry NY approached us, it was clear they were looking to separate themselves from their competitors in the crowded world of New York City restaurant websites. They envisioned a site full of all kinds of content and multimedia, and with a comprehensive and customizable restaurant search tool that would satisfy any eater’s needs.

The AHNY team also needed to make sure that any system they used to publish content supported and encouraged their specific editing process. Our development of features like the ability to specify which authors have permissions to publish live, post-dating of articles (so they go up at a future time), and the option for employees to preview content on the site without exposing it to the public proved key to the success of the project.

Challenges:

• Develop a site that could support the presentation and relationships of many different kinds of data—including restaurants, blog posts, videos, and top-5 lists.
• Solve the problem of New Yorkers being forced to choose between a few pre-defined, and often inflexible, neighborhoods when looking for restaurants on most other sites.
• Support the company’s editorial process by allowing writers to have an internal preview area before content goes live, and establishing permission-based publishing workflows
• Build an extensible, high capacity site so there’s room to grow in the future.

Solutions:

• Developed a website that integrates all the content types into a single system that supports all the key information for each type.
• Built a custom search solution on top of the Google Maps API and the site’s restaurant database to let people draw their own neighborhood.
• Integrated with Google Maps on single restaurant pages and search results pages.
• Engineered a publishing workflow with multiple entry statuses and employee-only preview areas, so entries could be previewed as if they were live on the site while being sent through the editorial chain.
• Coded a modular layout that gives administrators and editors easy access to change certain aspects of the design—without knowing HTML.
• Advised on strategies for code deployment, appropriate hosting, and a proper backup plan.