The Casual Gourmet, Cape Cod’s Foremost Caterer, needed a new look for the start of 2011. They recently redesigned their printed menu and wanted the website to match their new branding style. Marrying the new brand with large photos, The Casual Gourmet’s new look gives a rich, sophisticated feel that shows off some of the caterer’s best work.

In addition to a new design, I added a ‘Wedding Reception Site Map‘ using Google maps to show all of the wedding locations The Casual Gourmet works. Each of those locations came from the company’s wedding location directory where users can rate and review each location.

Previous Site Design

www.thecasualgourmet.com, Search Engine Optimization and Management by Dave Chase

When I initially took over thecasualgourmet.com, it was a mess. Although the design and functionality looked good on the surface, years of multiple webmasters of varying skill levels had taken it’s toll on both the code and organization of the site.

The client’s primary objective was to improve the ranking of the site in Google and other search engines. Although the site showed up on the first three or four pages for each keyword, as “Cape Cod’s Foremost Caterer” the site should have been in the top ten sites for many related keywords.

Search Engine Optimization

My first task was to add some basic html elements that for whatever reason had been forgotten in the site. It had no <p>, <h1>, <h2>, <h3> or image alt tags. Instead the entire site, which looked great, was done using the <span> tag and some very messy CSS.

Once I had cleaned up the content code, I moved on to the design code. The site was originally built using tables and spacer images. I basically replicated the design using XHTML and CSS and migrated the entire site into that new template.

While migrating the site into the new template, I adding appropriate description and title tags to each page’s meta data set and alt tags to each image on the site.

The results were great. The site moved up into the top 10 for it’s primary keywords Cape Cod Wedding & Cape Cod Weddings, two very competitive keywords. The site also moved to the top three for Cape Cod Caterer.

Site Additions

When I took over the site, it’s contact us form had broken down. That was my first change to the site itself.

In order to improve both the search engine optimization and usefulness of the site, the client and I decided to add a blog. Using WordPress, I added a blog with the same site design as the rest of the site with an easy to use administration panel so that the client could update clients on recent events and happenings.

Finally, I handle the day to day changes and additions to the site such as seasonal menus, new event sites and the latest photos from events.