This is Counter, working. Not a picture of a layout, the layout itself, rendered by the templates a real build uses, in both colour schemes, at whatever width you are reading on. Halfway Line is invented and does not exist; every price and number on it was written to show the layout.
Coffee and lunch. Wellington Point.
Halfway Line
Open from six, roasting our own since 2019, and doing about eight things properly rather than forty adequately. Dogs on the deck, kids welcome, and the whole menu is on this page.
Opening hours
- Monday to Friday
- 6am to 2pm
- Saturday and Sunday
- 6.30am to 2pm
- Public holidays
- 7am to 12pm, surcharge applies
Find us
- Address
- Sample address, Wellington Point
- Parking
- Street parking on both sides, and the council car park is a two minute walk.
- Public transport
- The 275 stops at the corner.
About
Two of us opened it in 2019 with a second hand roaster and a lease we could barely afford. We roast on Tuesdays, the deck is the good bit, and the bacon and egg roll has been on the menu since day one because people would riot.
No bookings for breakfast. Lunch tables of six or more, ring us.
Functions and the back room, send an email and you will get an answer the same day.
This form is switched off in the demonstration. On a real build it goes to your inbox and is recorded a second time, so a lost email is visible rather than silent.
The decisions already made
What you are choosing when you choose Counter
A kit is not a colour scheme. It is every decision that would otherwise be made on your time, which is the only reason $495 plus GST is a real number rather than an optimistic one.
Typography
- Display
- DM Serif Display at 400
- Body
- DM Sans at 400 and 500
- Weight on the page
- 85 KB, self-hosted, no third-party request
A single high contrast display serif does the whole appetite job in one weight, and its matching sans keeps a long menu tidy. Same designer, same skeleton, so they sit together without either one trying.
The signature
Opening hours and the address are pinned in the header on every screen size, and today's hours are stated in words rather than in a table you have to decode. The menu is the body of the page, not a PDF.
Who it talks to
Speaks to somebody standing on a footpath or sitting in a car, deciding in about eight seconds. Reads appetising but gets out of the way of the practical answer.
Suits
- Cafés
- Restaurants
- Bakeries
- Bars
- Food trucks
- Breweries
- Venues and function rooms
- Providores
Colourways
- Burnt orange on cream, as shown
- Olive on cream
- Ink on bone, no colour at all
Pick one. A fourth is a design decision and a design decision is not two hours.
Showing prices
Menu prices are the amount payable, GST included. A surcharge on a public holiday has to be stated wherever the prices are, which is why the sample hours line says it.
Which route
Counter is the quick route, and there is a slower one
The design decisions were made once, here, in advance. You choose the kit, the colourway and the order, and I fill it with your business. Live in days rather than months.
A design made for you is the other one, from $5,000 plus GST: starts at a blank page and a conversation about your business, not at a set of layouts. Every layout is drawn around your content and your brand, and there is no kit involved at any point. This is the honest answer for some businesses and the wrong answer for most, and I will tell you which you are before you pay for either.
Yours on a Counter build
- Your colourway, chosen from the three this kit was built and contrast tested in
- Your words, everywhere, in your own voice rather than the invented business in the demonstration
- Your photographs, placed and sized; until they exist the kit's own drawn artwork stands in, so a launch never waits on a photographer
- Which sections appear and in what order, chosen from this kit's own set
- Which pages exist and what they are called, on the five page build
- Your logo, your enquiry form, your phone number, your hours, your service list, your prices
Fixed, and that is what you are buying
- The two typefaces, because they are licensed, subsetted and already loading in under a tenth of a second
- The layout of each section, because drawing a new one is a design decision and a design decision is not two hours
- The set of sections available, which is this kit's set rather than all eight kits' sets
- The page count: one, or five. Not six
Both routes end the same way: every account in your name, paid on your card, and the whole site yours to take elsewhere. Nothing is rented from me, so starting on a kit locks you into nothing. If you outgrow it, the next build replaces it and you keep the domain, the address, the content and the search history.
What the price buys
Six sections at $495 plus GST, five pages at $990 plus GST
The demonstration at the top is an Express Landing: one page, 6 sections from this kit’s own set. Starter Five is the same kit across five pages.
Express Landing, $495 plus GST
- One page, one kit, one of that kit's three prepared colourways
- Up to six sections chosen from the kit's own set, arranged in the order that suits your job
- Your logo placed, your words placed, up to eight of your images placed
- One enquiry form, delivered to your inbox and recorded in a second place so a lost email is visible
- Mobile, dark mode, keyboard access and colour contrast, because they are already built into the kit
- Your domain connected, hosting and certificate set up in accounts held in your name and paid on your own card, never mine
- One consolidated round of changes inside 48 hours of the preview
- Submitted and verified in Google Search Console, sitemap lodged, and indexing CONFIRMED rather than assumed before I call the job done. The account is yours and I am a guest in it
- A recorded handover walkthrough of your own site, and seven days of hypercare
Starter Five, $990 plus GST
- Everything in Express Landing, plus four more pages
- Two layouts, a home layout and an inner page layout, so the site can grow without a redesign
- Navigation and footer structure, built from the kit's five page map or your own
- Up to twenty of your images placed
- Titles and descriptions written for every page, and structured data generated from what is visible so the two cannot disagree. What the search engines then do with it is their decision, not a deliverable
- Fourteen days of hypercare instead of seven
The five pages, for this kit
| Page | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Home | One image, the hours, the address, and what you are known for |
| Menu | The whole menu as text. Never a PDF, which nobody can read on a phone |
| Functions | Room sizes, minimum spends, and the package as words rather than a download |
| Our story | Short. Who cooks, where the coffee comes from, why you opened |
| Find us | Address, parking, public transport, and the hours again |
You can rename these or swap one for another. What you cannot do is add a sixth, because the fourth hour is already spent.
The honest part
What is never in this price
- Writing your copy, which is the single biggest cost in a website and is charged as its own thing
- Photography, retouching, or preparing images that are not already web ready
- Designing a logo, or redrawing one from a photograph of a sign
- Moving an existing site, its content or its search history
- A content management system, a login, or anything a customer signs into
- Payments, bookings, memberships or a shop
And what moves you off it
Any one of these makes a two hour job something else. The estimator asks about all of them, tells you which one applies to you, and shows what the price would be with it cleared.
- Your words are not written yet
- Your photographs need choosing, cropping or fixing
- There is an existing site to move across
- Anything beyond one enquiry form: bookings, payments, memberships
- The form collects health, financial or identity information
- You want to edit the pages yourself, which means a content management system
- Accounts have to be created or recovered on your behalf
- A second person has to approve the work
- There is no logo yet, or the only copy is a photograph of a sign
- Analytics that needs a consent banner
- Social profiles or an email list to set up
Paying accepts the terms of service, version 1.0. They cover what is supplied, what is needed from you, how a change is quoted and how a refund works. The version in force on the day you pay is the one that governs the job.