WATDA
Web Development
Description
WATDA is a lively Korean neighbourhood restaurant behind Ponsonby Central. The food is generous, affordable and built around a full Korean table — main, rice, soup and seasonal banchan. We rebuilt the site to feel like the restaurant and turn discovery into walk-ins.
Numbers
Restaurant, Website, Menu and visible FAQ structured data give search engines clean, specific facts.
Detailed llms.txt and ai.txt files make hours, pricing, dietary options and location directly quotable.
Original multi-megabyte photography was compressed for fast delivery without losing the food detail.
Off the Squarespace subscription, onto fast global hosting that costs nothing to run.
The problem
The old site had good writing but the design did not match the restaurant. It felt generic, led too heavily with the lunch offer, and buried what WATDA is actually known for: one generous Korean meal arriving as a whole table.
It also needed to answer the practical questions that drive a restaurant visit — what the food is, where to find it, exact hours, walk-in policy, dietary options and delivery — for both people and the search and AI systems they now ask.
What we did
A RESTAURANT-SPECIFIC SYSTEM
A cream-led visual system drawn from the real shop: door green, chilli red, aged timber and bold editorial type. The homepage leads with WATDA’s full-table meal, while the $14 lunch offer stays visible as the secondary reason to visit.
SEO + GEO LAYER
Search-intent titles, descriptive food imagery, a sitemap, exact opening hours and Restaurant, Menu, WebSite and visible FAQ structured data. Detailed llms.txt and ai.txt files make the restaurant’s key facts easy for answer engines to quote.
FAST, TASTEFUL MOTION
Compressed food photography, self-hosted fonts and efficient static delivery keep the experience light. GSAP motion adds restrained photo reveals, divider draws and parallax, with reduced-motion support and a normal silent meal reel.
OWNED, NOT RENTED
Off the Squarespace subscription onto fast global hosting at $0/month, on their own domain, with their Google Workspace email untouched through the switch.
Built in Astro with GSAP, ScrollTrigger and Lenis; deployed globally on Cloudflare Pages. SEO and GEO coverage includes canonical metadata, sitemap, Restaurant + Menu + FAQ structured data, llms.txt and ai.txt. Live at watda.co.nz.
More work
