Case Study: Hamel’s & The Summit View

Hamel’s & The Summit View: Informative. Adaptable. Beautiful.

Mike Hamel and his crew have been a fixture in Holyoke for nearly 30 years, providing catering and event services throughout the area. But Mike had a problem: people thought they knew Hamel’s and The Summit View, but nobody seemed to know just how much Hamel’s and The Summit View have to offer. He had a website, but 2 URL’s and no consistent Search Engine Optimization. That’s why he called us, and that’s why we were excited to help. There’s nothing we like more than helping local businesses get the word out.

A Big Job

Hamel’s and The Summit View does everything when it comes to events:

As you’d expect, Hamel’s caters events like weddings and Jack & Jills.

They host events throughout the year at The Summit View, from concerts to cruise nights.

At The Summit View, businesses and organizations hold meetings and conferences.

But did you know that emergency catering was a thing? We sure didn’t, until we got together with Mike and a couple of his managers.

We quickly discovered that we had a big job ahead of us. Services. Events. Menus. Twenty-eight menus!

There was so much to get into Hamel’s and The Summit View’s new site. We had to do it in a way that made it so customers would be able to keep track of all the options. We had to make it easy to maintain. We had to make it beautiful.

What We Did for Hamel’s:

We organized the menus. With two distinct businesses and two sets of menus, keeping everything straight for visitors to the site was paramount. We communicated with Mike about how he wanted things to look, and then we set about translating that to the screen. Our designers planned a layout that put a ton of information into a compact space and kept it understandable. If you’re after the Traditional Buffet or a Sit-Down Dinner, you’ll find the options easily. And there’s even a massive Do-it-Yourself option, neatly organized and ready to customize.

The Summit View had an ever-evolving series of events to host. Hamel’s has a menu with prices that sometimes have to change. So the site needed to be able to be updated easily. We set up a news/blog area so that they could the latest news and specials, the events director, could easily post a Cruise Night schedule or promote an upcoming concert series. As for the menu updates, the straightforward WordPress design makes it a snap for the catering manager, to keep pricing up-to-date. And we made sure Google would show hamelssummitview.com when people in the area searched for catering.

And then we needed to make it beautiful. We had a head start here, because Hamel’s and The Summit View’s presentations are so beautiful to start with that the photos on the site almost took themselves. Our lead designer, Alex, found the perfect combination of colors, fonts, and layout to present the images, menus and copy.

And so…

In the end, Hamel’s and The Summit View wound up with a beautiful, adaptable, informative site. A site that gets the word out to the people who thought they knew Hamel’s and The Summit View – and to the people who didn’t.

And oh, yeah – if you just got the call that 40 of your best friends are on their way to your place in an hour, Hamel’s can handle that with their emergency catering service.