Marmalade Cat Café

Marmalade Cat Café is located in Kelowna, BC, and is a quirky little place that values its healthy, homemade food and support of local artists. I came across their website during Digital Marketing class, when I was hunting for a site in need of SEO. Later, I redesigned the website for a project.

SEO Audit

In the SEO audit I conducted on their website, analyzing their keywords, indexed pages, title tags, meta descriptions, headings, content, links, alt tags, and mobile functionality. I explained the aspects that they did well, and the parts that needed improvement. Each page was checked for issues, and a detailed explanation is provided on what should be adjusted and why. A summary of the site's SEO quality overall is also provided.

The summary lists the top five issues found on the site. First, none of the images have proper alt tags, which makes them inaccesible to screen readers and is a missed opportunity to use keywords. Second, there are a handfull of unused pages that are being indexed by google. These should be removed since they aren't relevant and often contain outdated information. Third, the copy throughout the site needs to be reworked. There's some great keywords being used, but some features that customers would be interested in, like the live music nights, barely get mentioned. The information is also located all over the place, and it's difficult for users to find the information they're looking for. Fourth, links need to be utilized more. There were some broken links, and many missed opportunities to link to other sites. Finally, I think Marmalade Cat Cafe could benefit from using some keywords that are unique to them much more, like gluten free, vegetarian, and home-made.

Snippet of the SEO audit presentation for Marmalade Cat Café.
Wireframes of the Marmalade Cat Café site redesign

Redesigning the Website

The goal of the site is to lead users to the "Contact Us" page, leading to more customers dining in, ordering takeout, and just raising general awareness and interest. Considering the nature of their brand, I felt that the new design should be quirky, colourful, warm, laidback, and cheerful. The café building's colours have been brought into the website design.

A big part of the redesign was taking their existing copy and reorganizing it, to reduce the amount of pages and make it easier for users to find the info they're looking for. The images are staggered and have tilted elements to make the site feel less stiff. I created sections talking about live music nights, sunday brunch, their coffee card, and their Kelowna Arts Council partnership, since I felt they were very unique to Marmalade Cat Café and were worth giving greater attention to. A services page was made to combine the catering, hot entrée and dinner service, and their hot lunch program into one space. Also, I cleaned up the menu and gave it tab functionality to it would be easier to navigate (there wasn't even a link to the coffee menu on their site).

Wireframes of the Marmalade Cat Café site redesign

The Final Product

Here you can view the site, which was built in Adobe XD, complete with functioning links.