% open watda-website
WATDA Website
Rebuilt a restaurant's site and fixed the SEO the old one quietly broke.
PROBLEM
WATDA's site was on Squarespace: pricey, limited, and it didn't look like the room. Worse, it shipped a broken address in its structured data — telling Google the restaurant had no location, the opposite of what you want when people search for somewhere to eat nearby.
WHAT I BUILT
A full rebuild from scratch — faster, cheaper to host, a design that actually looks like the place, and proper SEO so it shows up correctly in search and maps.
HOW IT WORKS
Static site on Astro + Tailwind with tasteful motion (smooth scroll, scroll reveals, a Ken Burns crossfade, magnetic buttons, full reduced-motion fallback). Real menu, hours, address. Restaurant JSON-LD that fixes the empty-address bug, per-page meta, a branded share card, sitemap, images optimised ~2MB→120KB. Cloudflare Pages with a clean domain cutover, existing email untouched.
WHERE IT'S AT
Live at watda.co.nz — DNS on Cloudflare, SSL active, email preserved.
WHAT I LEARNED
The visible win is the design; the quiet win is the SEO plumbing. The old site was literally telling Google it had no address — a real cost in walk-ins for a local restaurant, and invisible from the page. Rebuilding let me fix what actually drives discovery, not just what you can see.
STACK
Astro 5 · Tailwind 4 · GSAP · Lenis · Cloudflare Pages
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