If you’ve ever heard someone say, “I know a great little out of the way place”, they could very well have been speaking of Cantler’s. It’s off the beaten path, to be sure, but it remains an Annapolis icon where tourists and locals alike gather for an authentic crab house experience.

In redesigning their website, we wanted to capture the rustic and seafaring motif that one finds at Cantler’s:

Apart from re-designing the site from the ground up, we were tasked with adding some new features to the website. First, we built the site in WordPress which will allow the staff to keep it up to date on their own. They will now have a news feed using the blogging feature of WordPress to post news, press releases, photos, and event announcements.

Secondly, we were asked to incorporate the ability to sell gift cards and t-shirts on the website also.

Payments for both items are being handled by Paypal. Completed orders are stored in a database accessible from the WordPress admin as well as being emailed to the restaurant and the purchaser.

One of the challenges with the t-shirt order component is that Cantler’s does not have a regular set of t-shirt colors that they inventory. Their available shirt colors change all the time. So we had to create a way for the staff to easily manage the available shirt colors through the admin.

Creating a new color is easy:

In this past week that the site has been up and running, Cantler’s has sold gift cards to people all over the country. I’m not going to tell you how much they have sold, but I can tell you that in one week, their sales paid for 1/3 of their new website. Now, I can’t say whether these sales would have been made without the order form on the website, but I am certain that not all of them would have been. The addition of the simple, easy ordering process has certainly created a new revenue stream for the restaurant and certainly made the investment in a better web presence worthwhile.