A takeout shop, a phone, and about a minute
Old School Pizza is a takeout and delivery shop on Sackville Drive in Middle Sackville. Nearly every visit to its website is somebody hungry, on a phone, deciding quickly. They want three things: what is on the menu, whether the shop is open, and how to order. Anything that slows those three down costs an order.
So the brief was short. Make the menu readable at a glance, make the hours impossible to miss, make calling a single tap, and get everything else out of the way. The shop already had a strong identity in its logo, signage and flyers, and the site needed to look like the place you walk into, not like every other pizza site.
Five pages, and a menu that stays current
The site is five pages. Home leads with the signature items, the deals and real Google reviews. Menu is the main event, with a category bar that sticks to the top of the screen so a visitor can jump from pizzas to donairs to subs without scrolling the whole list. Deals shows every combo as a coupon. Our Story covers the shop's history, and Visit has the summer and winter hours, a map, the phone numbers and the answers to common questions.
The colours and type come straight from the shop's logo and signage, and the pizza jokes painted on the shop wall became the dividers between sections. Each page carries structured data for the restaurant, the menu and its questions, written for searches around Middle Sackville and Sackville.
Under the hood, the menu, the deals and the hours live in a small database rather than in the page files. The pages still ship as plain HTML so search engines can read them, then refresh from the database when they load. When the shop changes a price or adds a special, it is a quick update on our end rather than a rebuild, and the open-now badge reads the same hours table, so it can never disagree with the Visit page. The shop keeps different hours in summer and winter, so the table holds both, along with which months count as summer.
One search detail mattered more than it looks. A different business called Old School Pizza, in Ontario, owns a very similar web address. Every page is written around Middle Sackville and Sackville Drive, with the shop's own address and phone numbers in the structured data, so a search engine has no reason to confuse the two.
Who keeps it current
The owner runs a pizza shop, not a website, so there is nothing for him to learn or log into. Every text, photo, menu, deal and hours change goes through the studio. He calls or texts, and it is handled.
That matters more for a takeout shop than for most businesses. A menu with last month's prices or a deal that ended in the spring costs trust at exactly the moment somebody is deciding where to order. Keeping it current is part of the job.
What changed
The shop now has a site that matches the shop, scores 98 for performance and 100 for SEO on desktop (Lighthouse, 16 September 2026), and stays current without the owner touching it. What we do not have yet is the number that matters most to a takeout shop: how many people tap to call or ask for directions. That needs a counter on the site, which is the next thing to add.
What we would do differently
- Photograph the food before launch. The site launched with licensed stock photos as stand-ins while we waited on pictures of the shop's own food. Real photos from the kitchen beat any stock picture, and an hour with a phone camera before launch would have been worth it.
- Lighter pages for phones. Desktop is fast. The phone run is slower than we want, mostly from photo weight, so it is not in the strip above.
- Count taps from day one. Click-to-call and directions taps should have been tracked from launch.
In the owner's words
“One of the best and local.”
Wayne M., Owner, Old School Pizza, in a Google review
See it live
The site is at oldschoolpizzainc.ca. If you run a restaurant or a shop in Sackville, Bedford or anywhere around the city, the Halifax web design page and the Sackville page cover how we work locally.
Sources: Lighthouse runs dated 2026-09-16.