Emma Sottardi | Bartelby & Sage

The Goal

Bartleby & Sage is an upscale catering and events company serving the NYC tri-state area.

Their website had been built and maintained by two people skilled in Wordpress.They needed a Webflow expert to redesign and rebuild every page on the site, creating overall consistency and improving their findability.

About the Project

I was engaged for a 20hr/month retainer to bring the site into alignment with the quality and classiness of the company and brand, but an RPF from a super upscale venue came in and demanded speed.

I redesigned and rebuilt the 12 core pages of the site in 10 days. The new site went live the day the RFP was submitted.

Design Concepts

Bartleby & Sage has been catering and facilitating events for 3 decades so they have hundreds of amazing photographs. I wanted to showcase the company using as many of their images as possible, large and without any overlays.

Visual Direction

I chose layouts that allow the images and accompanying text to breathe.

I left their brand green in the palette, but toned down the rest of the colors favoring brown neutrals and very light shades of green.

Before

The images around the site had dark overlays on them. I feel that images of food shouldn't have any overlays.

The logos within the marquee began appearing on the left margin.
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Not all headings were displayed in the heading font.

Padding around the site was inconsistent.

Confusing hierarchy drew the viewers eyes to less important information,

There were many color combinations and hover interactions that did not pass Accessibility guidelines.

After

This left/right layout really works for this website as it allows the images to shine.

The client prefered to have the logo section static.

The cards in the Benefits section are sticky so they lay on top of each other, the card behind reduces in scale while the front card slides over it.

The buttons in the Event Types section are pointing to unique form pages.

The Event Types cards and the CTAs are components that are used on multiple pages.

How I added value

Formatted for visual consistency

The original site didn’t have a Style Guide in place, so I did that first-thing.

Then I went to work on the variables, establishing settings for four breakpoint sizes for everything from font and container sizes, to max-width containers, spacing gaps, and padding.

Created CMS collections

I created collections for the team members, for Blog post authors, Blog post categories, venues, and testimonials.

It is now possible to filter the testimonials so they match the page content (e.g., corporate event testimonials on the Corporate Events page). Also, it’s now possible to easily add and delete venues.

Provided new copy

The previous copy was not optimized for SEO and AEO and did not match the upscale nature of the brand.

I worked with Claude to create copy that would give the site authority, trustworthiness, show off their experience and expertise, and invite AI agents to use the content on the site as source material for inquiries relating to catering and events in the NY tri-state area.

Made order of their fonts

There were 16 font files uploaded into the file, in every file format possible, none of which was correct. Because the demo version of their header font was being used, certain symbols (like the ampersand and the apostrophe), were not rendering properly. Other, non-brand fonts had been loaded into the file to overcome that problem.

I facilitated the purchasing of the web font and uploaded only the four needed styles. Additionally, Inter had been uploaded as a Google Font which creates problems with their analytics tag, I uploaded the font in the proper file format.

How I will continue to add value

Proactively suggest ways to keep the site fresh

Pages that are not refreshed on a quarterly basis are 3× more likely to lose AI citations compared to recently updated ones.

I will regularly trawl Google Reviews for testimonials I can add to the CMS collection.

A blog is an excellent way to create the infamous E.E.A.T. (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) and posts written by the Founder of Bartleby & Sage have all of those things.

I will add blog posts to the CMS at least once a month and update the images in the gallery when new images hit the Drive.

Desktop Screens

Visit live site