Santa Barbara Chicken Ranch
Website Design & SEO, Content Creation
Industry
Restaurant, mesquite BBQ, Santa Barbara and Goleta
Timeline
July to September 2026
Live Project
Mission
Move a Santa Barbara favorite off Wix onto a site that sells the food on a phone, protect the local ranking it already held through the switch, and put the menu in the owners' hands.
Mission
Move a Santa Barbara favorite off Wix onto a site that sells the food on a phone, protect the local ranking it already held through the switch, and put the menu in the owners' hands.
Challenge
Santa Barbara Chicken Ranch is family-owned mesquite BBQ with two locations, Santa Barbara and Goleta, and it already held the first result for chicken restaurant searches in town on an aging Wix site. That was the risk. A rebuild that lost the ranking, broke a printed link or dropped the restaurant's email for an afternoon would cost more than the old site ever did. And every price change still had to go through a developer.
Process
We built a fast, mobile-first site around the two things a hungry person wants: the food, and the quickest way to order it. Menu, catering and ordering links for both locations, with every image optimized so the pages stay quick on a phone. Behind it sits a self-serve admin where the owners edit menu and catering prices themselves; a change is live the moment they save. We audited the site against WCAG 2.1 AA and fixed everything the audit found. Along the way we cut a health claim the kitchen could not back, and said no to a shop page, because pickup-only ordering leaves it nothing to sell. The migration was planned like surgery. Every one of the old site's thirteen URLs redirects to its twin, the DNS moved with the email records already in place, and the canonicals, sitemap and schema were set to protect the first-place ranking the restaurant walked in with.