Piece of Potato
A loaded-potato eatery deserves a working website
The current site at pieceofpotato.com does open, but only after the browser shows a full-page red warning that the site isn't safe. Most visitors back out. The redesign keeps Chef Toole's brand voice, recipes, and photos but ships a site that opens cleanly, with the address, hours, menu, and ordering routes front and centre.
The brief
Piece of Potato is a carry-out, delivery and catering eatery on Aldrich Street in Aiken, owned by Chef Derrick Toole. The current site at pieceofpotato.com has all the right pages, Home, Menu, Meet the Chef, Brand Story, Contact, built on a site-builder template. The problem isn’t whether a site exists. It’s whether anyone can actually get to it.
The problem most visitors hit first. Modern browsers check every site for a small, invisible “ID card” that proves the site is who it says it is. The one on Piece of Potato’s site is broken. So when somebody clicks a link to pieceofpotato.com, their browser puts up a full-screen red warning: “Your connection is not private,” “attackers may be trying to steal your information.” There’s a small grey link to push through, but most people see the warning and back out.
The brief: keep everything Chef Toole has carefully built, the brand voice, the menu, the family-story page, the customer photos, and ship it on a site that opens cleanly and reads well on a phone.
What changed
- A site that opens. Hand-built and deployed with a clean security setup, so no browser warnings before the page has even loaded.
- Address and hours on the front page. A pinned strip on the home page shows the address (1107 Aldrich St NW), the seasonal open hours, the delivery radius, and the brand’s two core principles. Nothing to click, nothing to scroll for.
- Five pages, no filler. Home, Menu, Meet the Chef, Brand Story, Visit. Same structure as the existing site, with order-online and social links pinned in the navigation.
- An honest menu. Nine builds plus a Build-Your-Own, drinks priced in plain dollars, all clickable through to Chef Toole’s existing Square order page. Customer review quotes pulled in from the live site.
- Meet the Chef, kept verbatim. Chef Toole’s bio (Marine veteran, 25 years in the food industry, dad of four, Carolina Panthers fanatic) is preserved word-for-word from the existing site so his voice carries over.
- Loads quickly even on a slow phone signal. The new page is a fraction of the weight of the old one, and visibly faster even on a weak connection.
Visual direction
A warm, hand-set Americana feel, cream paper, butter yellow, ember red, brown, with a casual cursive accent for the “personal touch” details. Three typefaces work together: a sturdy serif for headlines, a clean modern face for paragraphs, and a hand-written look for the little notes that nod to the brand’s chalkboard-and-foil aesthetic. It looks like the kitchen, not like a tech company.
Easy to keep up to date
The hours, menu items, and daily features are kept in a short, plain-text file. A single five-line edit per week is enough to change the hours, swap an item, or update the catering notes. No logins, no clunky admin panel. Updates appear on the live site within a minute. Chef Toole can hand the edits off to anyone willing to spend five minutes learning the file, or I can handle them on a small monthly retainer.
What I’d add next
A proper catering inquiry form that routes to Orders@PieceofPotato.com with the head count and date pre-filled, automatic syncing with the Google Business Profile so the address and hours are always right on Google Maps, and a small touch so that when someone shares Chef Toole’s potato of the week on Instagram, the post shows the actual potato instead of a generic preview.