Case study · Website redesign · Live
The Fermentary
A Lowell, Arkansas brewpub whose best design asset was already sitting on the table. It was the printed menu. The old Wix site threw that away for generic rounded cards.
This redesign puts the menu’s own language back on the web, turns two flat menu images into real, searchable text, and rebuilds the whole thing as a static, accessible, zero-dependency site.
Live at fermentarypub.com (opens in a new tab) since October 2026 · shown here with the owners’ blessing
7
pages, no build step required to deploy
0
dependencies: no framework, no tracking scripts
AA
WCAG 2.1, every key text and background pair measured
<1MB
first load, with everything below the fold lazy-loaded
The best asset the brand owned was its menu
Not the logo or the photos. The printed menu. It’s a proper editorial broadsheet: a Cinzel masthead, hairline rules, slate-navy panels, leader dots, pale-blue accents. The website ignored all of it. So the redesign doesn’t invent a look. It reads the one the client already paid a printer for, and puts it on the web.
Same business. Same information.
Nothing here is invented copy or stock filler. Every fact on the redesign is the same fact that was on the old Wix site, re-set in the brand’s own voice.
Home
fermentarypub.com/
Before · Wix
After
Food
fermentarypub.com/menu → /food
Before · Wix
After
Visit
fermentarypub.com/contact-us → /visit
Before · Wix
After
And why it matters
The visual jump is the easy part to see. These are the decisions underneath it, the ones that change what the site can do.
A
The menu became text
The full food menu existed only as two flat PNGs, invisible to Google, unreadable by a screen reader and unusable on a phone. It's now transcribed into real markup. The single biggest SEO and accessibility win on the site.
2 images → a real, searchable menu
B
Three pages became one
Hours, directions and a phone number were spread across a Contact Us page and scattered blocks. People chasing those are doing one job, not three. They're merged into a single Visit page.
Contact + hours + map → Visit
C
The site learned the hours
A live open / closed status sits in the dateline at the top of every page, computed from the real hours in America/Chicago so it reads correctly wherever you are. Today's row is highlighted in the hours tables, all from one hours object.
static hours list → “Open now / Closed”
D
The clutter came out
Share Your Experience left the primary nav. Review-chasing belongs on a receipt, not next to Food. The Restaurant Guru badge came off the hero. No carousels, no full-width stock sliders, no trio of identical icon cards.
8 nav items + badges → 5 that matter
Plus local SEO: BrewPub JSON-LD with address, phone, opening hours and social profiles on every page, and unique titles, descriptions and canonicals, so a search for “brewery in Lowell” has something structured to read.
A palette sampled, not invented
Every colour was pulled with an eyedropper from something the brand already owns, like the menu, the signage, the logo and the building. Nothing arbitrary, so it can’t clash with the place itself.
Slate
#343F4C
Menu masthead, signage trim, logo field
Fermenter
#A9C0DE
The pale blue of the logo mark and the exterior sign
Brass
#C2A14A
The accent already in use on the current site
Brass ink
#6E5514
Darkened for text, since raw brass on cream is 2.2:1 and fails AA
Bone
#F4F1EA
The menu's paper stock
Brewed next door.
Cinzel · display and masthead, lifted from the printed menu’s title type
Poured right here.
Cormorant Garamond italic · a second voice, so headings aren’t all caps all the time
I · SCRATCH KITCHEN · 4–6 PM
Space Grotesk · labels, prices and running text
Verified, not assumed
WCAG 2.1 AA, checked the way you’d check anything you’re going to put your name on.
Contrast, measured
Every text-and-surface pair was measured and passes. Copy over photography sits on scrims tuned to still clear AA against a pure-white region of the image, the worst case there is.
Keyboard, all the way
Skip link, visible focus rings, focus trapped in the mobile drawer and the lightbox, Escape closes both, and focus returns to whatever opened them.
Structure and semantics
One h1 per page, ordered headings, header / main / footer landmarks, an alt on every image, a label on every icon button, no duplicate IDs.
Motion and no-JS
prefers-reduced-motion disables the reveals, the hero settle, the status pulse and smooth scrolling. With JavaScript off, all content stays visible and the nav, menus and forms still work.
Target sizes
Nothing interactive is under 24 × 24, meeting the WCAG 2.2 target-size minimum. Footer text links sit at roughly 27px with generous spacing.
Native where it counts
FAQs use native details elements, so expand and collapse semantics are correct without any scripting to get wrong.
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