Modernising a decaying website and restaurant booking system

An elderly business owner, based in Germany, from a rural farming village in Punjab, North India. He will not mind us saying that he is very illiterate when it comes to tech (as most people from his generation are) and is a non native english/german speaker.

Online bookings have slowed to a trickle and the restaurant owner has issues with keeping track of their current/scheduled bookings and which ones he has already confirmed. Upon investigation we could see that their website was built decades ago and implements a lot of practices which are now considered to be harmful to SEO.

Further to that we discovered that the current 'booking system' was essentially an insecure form with poor usability sending an email to the owner. The owner was then manually writing bookings down in a paperback diary and relying to customers personally by email to let them know their booking is confirmed.

Compounding the above issues was the lack of any real development resource within the business and the lack of funds to hire any internal development resource. The majority of vendors he contacted were quoting astronomical fees for solutions which included features which were either not needed (such as a blog) or required regular maintenance to keep the business's core information (such as open hours) up to date.

We rebuilt his website using modern techniques and integrated it with our 'Managed Web Presence' service. In doing this we removed the need for any of his team to update the website when the restaurant changes its open hours thanks to our auto updating functionality.

We then created a simple bespoke booking management system which enabled him to easily confirm/reject bookings by clicking a button from a confirmation email. The booking management system we created also allows him and his team to login to a portal where they can see information about all upcoming and previous bookings. To further assist him with his day-to-day management of capacity we setup a scheduled email which alerts of the coming day's bookings every morning