That's the whole reason for this conversation. Everything here is about closing that gap — and it's a concept, so anything that isn't right is meant to be marked up.
The truck is going to put "functions at Deakin & Me" in front of a lot of Canberra. People will see it at the lights, they'll be curious, and they'll do exactly one thing.
They'll google you.
So the question worth answering today is what they find when they do.
Everything on the following pages is a starting point built from the outside looking in. What goes on the real site should be your words, not ours.
The café side already works. Weekdays are strong, the weekend holds up, the precinct knows you. So the café isn't the thing that needs selling.
The room is.
But someone landing on the site today would never know functions exist. Nothing on the front page mentions them. You have to already know, and then go looking.
Your best-kept secret is the thing you're about to pay a truck to advertise.
Watch the top of the page. It changes on its own.
By day it's the café your office already loves. Then it flips — after three, the whole room is yours.
Same website, two businesses. Anyone who lands here knows within seconds that you host functions, and they're one button away from asking about a date.
Christmas parties. Retirements. Team celebrations. Private events. That's who's out there — hundreds of small teams inside the agencies down the road, and every one of them has someone who's been handed the job of sorting out the Christmas party.
Right now that person has no idea you exist. They'll ring a club with a function room and no kitchen.
Picture a Tuesday in October. Someone in a team of forty gets handed the Christmas party. They search "function venue Deakin". You either come up, or you don't.
The enquiry form asks four things up front: the date, the headcount, the type of event, and a budget range.
That's deliberate. It means when the enquiry lands in your inbox, you can answer it in one email instead of three back-and-forths. You quote once and you're done.
There's no menu on it. There's a link to a PDF.
On a phone that either downloads a file or opens type so small it has to be pinched and dragged around. Most people give up before they get to the food.
A link to a PDF.
Nothing to read on the page. Nothing Google can read either.
The whole winter menu, on the page.
Gluten-free marked, the Naughty Bar included, and it reads perfectly on a phone.
And at the bottom of your own printed menu is the line "do you have a big celebration coming up?"
You're already selling functions on paper. This just does it where people are actually looking.
Individually they're small. Together they're the difference between a venue someone trusts with forty people and one they're not sure about.
The rating isn't the problem. You're the highest-rated established café in Deakin.
The problem is your listing doesn't say a word about functions.
Someone searching for a venue will never see you. Someone reading your listing right now can't tell you'd host their party.
That's part of what gets looked after every month: the listing says what you actually sell, the photos stay current, and the questions people ask get answered before they ring.
The first is Google. Someone types "function venue Deakin" or "Christmas party venue Canberra". For Google to put you in that answer, the words have to exist on your website as text it can read.
Right now your food sits inside a PDF and your functions sit nowhere at all. A PDF menu is invisible to Google. Every search for a dish you're known for, every search for gluten free, every search for a function room — none of it can find you, because there's nothing there to find.
The new site puts all of it in plain text: the menu, the function types, the capacity, the suburb. That's not a trick. It's just making the words exist.
That's the second place. A lot of people don't search any more, they ask. And an assistant can only recommend a venue whose details it can actually read.
Part of the build is a set of files written for exactly that — a plain, factual summary of what you do, who you serve, where you are and what it costs, published so the assistants can read it. Almost nobody in Canberra is doing this yet.
We can't promise you'll be the answer. But right now you're not even in the room when the question gets asked.
This is the part most cheap rebuilds get wrong, and it's the reason some businesses replace a website and watch the phone go quiet for three months.
Your current site has years of history with Google. Every page it has indexed, every link pointing at it, all attached to addresses that would simply stop existing the day it's replaced.
So before anything goes live, every one of those addresses gets mapped to its new home and redirected. You keep your domain. Nothing 404s. Then Google gets watched for four weeks afterwards, and if anything slips that's fixed as part of the monthly, not billed as extra.
It's step one of the job, not an afterthought.
Build paid up front. Walk away whenever you like.
The build fee is waived. Leave early and the $900 becomes payable. That's the only catch.
All prices ex GST.
Four times a year the menu changes. That's included. New food photography goes up. Included. December's function menu live in October, when people are actually booking. Included.
It isn't a website sitting there. It's someone keeping it working while you run the café.
The truck's job is to make people curious about functions. Right now, when they get curious and look you up, they find a site that doesn't mention functions and a menu page that doesn't work on a phone.
Get this live first, and the money already spent on the truck lands somewhere.
From a yes, it's about a week: one sitting to get the words right in your voice, then two points where you approve it before anything goes public.
Nothing here is fixed. The photos, the wording, the prices on the menu, what you'd actually offer for a function — all of it is yours to change.