Big's BBQ

The brief

Big's BBQ cooks Texas-style barbecue over live fire, on site, at private parties and corporate events around Essex. The fires are lit hours before guests arrive, the big cuts are carved in front of the crowd, and most of the people eating it never booked it: they are guests at someone else's event. That is a lovely problem to have and an awkward one to sell online.

Because by the time someone thinks to look Big's up, they are usually standing at an event with a phone in one hand and a plate in the other. The site had to work in exactly that moment: menu, prices and a way to book, all readable in a queue, with no phone call to make and no account to create. Big's takes bookings on WhatsApp, so the site had to end there too, not at a contact form that goes nowhere.

What we built

We built a one-page site that puts the cooking first. Two packages, Silver and Gold, are priced per head, and a single toggle flips every price between private hire and corporate rates, so there is no second pricing page to keep in sync. The menu reads the way the pit actually runs: slow cuts like pulled pork and beef ribs carry their hours, hot and fast items like chicken drummers and burgers are done in minutes, and every cut says which fire it comes off.

Ordering is a short composer, not a form into the void. Pick the event type and package, add a rough date and a guest count, and the site writes the WhatsApp message for you and opens the chat, with the details already laid out. Nothing sends until the customer hits send. Around it sit a chat-styled FAQ that answers the way Big's would on WhatsApp, typing indicator and all, and a gallery of photos and short clips from real cooks: smoke rings, carving boards, open flame.

The details that mattered

• 01

  The type does the smoke-shack work: condensed poster capitals for headlines over a bookish serif for body copy, so the page reads like a hand-painted menu board yet stays comfortable on a small screen.

• 02

  Video earns its keep. Clips of the pit ship with poster frames so nothing blocks the first paint, the gallery films wait to load until they are played, each has its own pause control, photographs lazy-load, and the whole page calms down for anyone with reduced motion switched on.

• 03

  The booking composer checks guest numbers against the real minimums, 25 for private hire and 35 for corporate, and answers with a plain warning rather than a block: you can still send, and Big's will see what they can do.

• 04

  On a phone the composer rises as a bottom sheet with safe-area padding, keeping the send button clear of the home bar; on a laptop it becomes a centred dialogue that holds keyboard focus until it closes.

• 05

  Every cut on the fire clock carries its why: pulled pork gets 10 to 12 hours because collagen only melts slowly into gelatine, burgers get minutes because anything longer steals the juice. The menu teaches, which is quietly the best sales copy on the page.