Sisters Kitchen — Home Kitchen Ordering & Catering Website
A family takeaway kitchen's weekly menu, pre-orders and catering enquiries, run entirely from a phone.
A family-run home kitchen sells differently from a restaurant. There's no fixed menu — there's what's being cooked this week, available on a particular day, with orders closing before the cooking starts. The business runs on Facebook posts, which means the menu vanishes into the feed, orders arrive as comments and messages that get missed, and nothing is searchable by anyone looking for home-cooked food nearby. Catering enquiries and event photos live in the same stream and are just as hard to retrieve. Anything built for it also has to be operable from a phone in a kitchen — the owner isn't going to sit at a desktop to accept an order.
A Django site built around how this kitchen actually trades. Dishes carry an availability date and time and an order deadline, so the menu reflects what's genuinely being cooked and stops taking orders when the kitchen stops. Weekly specials run alongside individual dishes with their own ordering instructions, shown to customers in a carousel. Pre-orders capture pickup date and time; catering enquiries capture the event type, date, guest count and requirements. Because non-Latin dish names would otherwise produce empty URLs, slugs allow Unicode — the menu works properly in Bangla. A phone-first staff panel handles day-to-day management without the Django admin, and staff can accept an order and email the customer directly from it. Order notifications route to a configurable list of recipients with per-type toggles, so different people can be alerted about dish orders, weekly deals and catering separately without editing code. SEO is treated as a feature rather than an afterthought: dishes, specials and event albums each carry their own title, description and URL, and admin-editable landing pages let the owner publish location and service pages without a developer.
Outcome
Live on cPanel shared hosting under Passenger, with a documented deployment path and a MySQL driver fallback for accounts where the preferred client can't compile. Deliberately MySQL-only in production, with database credentials required rather than silently falling back to defaults. Page load and image handling were optimised after launch, and the site has carried real orders since.
Key features
- Dishes with availability date, serving time and an order deadline that closes ordering automatically
- Weekly specials with their own pricing, ordering instructions and photo sets, shown as a homepage carousel
- Pre-orders capturing pickup date and time, items and notes
- Separate individual-dish order flow with its own status tracking
- Catering enquiries capturing event type, date, guest count and requirements
- Phone-first staff panel for managing orders and menu without the Django admin
- One-click order acceptance that emails the customer a confirmation with an optional note
- Configurable notification recipients with per-type toggles for dish orders, weekly deals and catering
- Unicode-aware slugs so Bangla dish names get real, working URLs
- Per-item SEO titles, descriptions and slugs across dishes, specials and event albums
- Admin-editable landing pages with optional dish listings and catering call-to-action
- Event albums and a general gallery with captions, alt text and manual sort order
- Alt text prompted on every image upload, for accessibility
- Editable site settings — business name, tagline, bio, location, and social links that stay hidden until filled in
- Automatic sitemap and robots.txt
- Hero photo rotation managed from admin
- Soft-hide toggles throughout, so content is deactivated rather than deleted
Tech stack
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