County of San Mateo Human Services needed to rebrand and build a new website for Catering Connection & Café, a Vocational Rehabilitation Services (VRS) business. Through Catering Connection, the County provides employment opportunities to community members facing barriers to entry, enabling them to learn food service skills with on-the-job paid training in a fully-equipped industrial kitchen.
Five-star Art Direction
A well-known adage among chefs is, “You eat with your eyes first,” so we knew the visual content on the website had to be five stars. If you’ve ever looked at a stock photo and cringed, you both feel our pain and understand the value of unique images. When the perfect image doesn’t exist, the best option is to produce it. That’s exactly what we did for Catering Connection.
UPRAISE scouted a photographer, coordinated the photoshoot, developed a shot list, provided on-set photo and art direction and selected the final images. From start to finish, we ensured the process was smooth and stress-free. As a result, we produced visual content for the website that told the Catering Connection story in a memorable way.
Sumptuous Logo Design
Creating the perfect bespoke logo for your business is the first step to developing your brand. When designing the Catering Connection logo, our job was to create an appealing and differentiated graphic and to ensure that it would support the client’s business and marketing goals by encouraging audiences to learn more.
UPRAISE provided multiple contemporary logo design concepts featuring easy-to-read typography and graphic elements aligned with the new brand. Upon finalizing the logo, we helped Catering Connection begin the trademarking process and developed graphic standard guidelines for logo usage.
The graphic standard guidelines included fonts, color codes and how to use and place the logo on the website and in other Catering Connection documents, such as brochures, postcards and other marketing collateral. Our goal was to deliver a cohesive brand experience, making it easier for people to recognize Catering Connection and associate the logo with a high-quality business they can rely on.
Reimagined Website Design + Development
A website is arguably the most important marketing asset, and Catering Connection was long overdue for a new one. We completely reinvented the website, starting from scratch to implement a CMS strategy for more complex retail ordering. We then drafted compelling copy, produced enticing images and optimized for SEO. The end result was a simple, attractive, contemporary design with elements that attracted the viewer to the site and guided them down the page.
We implemented quite a few capabilities on the back end to deliver an unmatched user experience.
Here are some of the most notable features:
- Product modifiers to suggest complimentary dishes once an item is selected
- Tax rates to automatically apply when the customer enters their zip code during checkout
- POS integration to determine if the ingredients are in stock
- Rolling charges to update total cost as customers add items to their cart
- Automatic email confirmation to notify customers that their order has been received
- … and much more
Tasty Results
UPRAISE’s branding strategy for Catering Connection really helped take the business to the next level. The end result was a visually appealing, user-friendly website interface and a unique logo accompanied by brand usage guidelines to establish brand identity and ensure consistency moving forward.
Portfolio
