The Client
Murphy Browns is a family-run restaurant on the Cavehill Road in North Belfast, a short drive from the city centre. Now in its 25th year, it has built a reputation as a cosy, welcoming spot for homemade food and warm hospitality. It's the kind of place locals return to for a Sunday lunch or a family celebration, and where visitors to Belfast are pointed by people who live nearby.
Following a refurbishment, the restaurant needed a website that matched the quality of the experience in the room: something warm, easy to browse and genuinely reflective of the place, rather than a site that fought against them every time the menu changed.
The Brief
Murphy Browns came to us with an ageing WordPress site that had become more of a liability than an asset. It was overly complicated to update, meaning simple changes like swapping out a menu or adding seasonal opening hours turned into a job the team couldn't handle themselves. More seriously, the site had been hacked repeatedly, creating downtime and reputational risk for a business that relies on people finding accurate information quickly.
The brief was to rebuild from the ground up on a platform that was flexible, secure and straightforward for the team to manage day to day. Content needed to be structured around how a restaurant actually works, covering menus, opening hours, news and offers, so staff could make updates confidently without touching anything technical or worrying about breaking a layout.
It also had to work seamlessly with Tableo, the booking system already in use, so that reserving a table remained a single, frictionless step for customers rather than a detour off the site.
The Results
The new site was built on Craft CMS, chosen for its security-first architecture and the level of control it gives over how content is structured and edited. Menus, opening times and page content are now managed through a clean, purpose-built admin area that mirrors the way the team think about their own business, so updates take minutes rather than requiring outside help.
The move away from WordPress removed the plugin-heavy setup that had left the previous site exposed. With a hardened, regularly maintained platform in place, the security issues that had plagued them for years are behind them.
The Tableo booking integration sits naturally within the design, letting customers move from browsing a menu to reserving a table without leaving the site. The result is a fast, modern presence that showcases the food and the atmosphere properly, gives the team full ownership of their own content, and gives their customers a far easier route to the table.
