Skyward Digital
Skyward Digital Websites for cafés
Cafés, restaurants, bakeries, food trucks and caterers Auckland and all of New Zealand

Google will send you the flat white. It cannot send you the table of thirty.

Almost everything you get asked in a day is answered before anybody reaches a website. Are you open, where are you, what does it look like, is there parking. That is a listing, it costs $395 to put right, and we would rather sell you that than a site you do not need yet. Then there is the other order — the function, the catering run, the platters for an office, the twenty-first, the wake. One person plans it days ahead, reading, on a phone, and they need a menu they can actually read and a number they can put in front of somebody else. That one is the website, and most of the time it is not there.

Talk to us about it What we would build
Where most start$395 Google profile
What the site is forMenu, functions, catering
A site, from$2,450, GST in
Who you deal withJosh, on 022 584 0585
01 / TWO CUSTOMERS

Most of your day is
decided before anyone
opens a website.

Two different people look you up and they are not looking for the same thing. The first wants coffee in the next twenty minutes and will never reach your site. The second is organising something, days out, for other people. Nearly every hospitality website in the country is built for the first one, who does not need it.

  1. Open now

    The question is answered above your website, not on it

    Somebody standing on a footpath types two words and a suburb. What comes back is a map, three names, a photograph and the word open or closed. They pick one and start walking. Your website was never part of that and putting more effort into it will not make it part of that.

  2. The photo

    They are looking at the room, and the room is on the listing

    The pictures that decide it are the ones attached to your Google listing, and half of them were taken by customers rather than by you. If the most recent one is of a courtyard you took the umbrellas out of two summers ago, that is what the room looks like as far as the internet is concerned.

  3. The hours

    A wrong hour on a public holiday costs a whole morning

    Labour Day, Waitangi, the Monday after. The listing keeps whatever was set when it was created unless somebody changes it, and a venue shown as closed when it is open gets no walk-ins at all that day. Nobody rings to check. They go to the one that says open. That is a setting, not a website.

  4. Getting there

    Directions, and then the two minutes of standing outside

    The pin gets them to the street. What happens next — the car park round the back, the door that is not the obvious one, the flight of stairs, whether the pram fits — is not in the listing and is not usually anywhere else either. This is the first row where a page of your own would have earned its keep.

  5. The reader

    Somebody in the group cannot eat something

    Coeliac, an allergy, vegan, halal, a toddler. That person does not decide in the queue, because they cannot afford to. They read the menu before anybody leaves the house, and whatever your menu happens to say about it, they need to be able to find it and read it. If they cannot, they quietly suggest somewhere else and the other five never know why.

  6. The table

    Eight people, a Saturday, and nobody wants to ring

    A group booking is the point where somebody has to find out whether you take them at all. Plenty of places do not, which is a perfectly good answer, and saying so plainly on a page saves everyone the call. Saying nothing sends them to the venue down the road whose website said yes or no.

  7. The order

    Forty sandwiches, Thursday, invoiced to an office

    Somebody has been told to sort morning tea. They are at a desk, comparing three places, and they need a per-head number, a cut-off time and a page they can forward to whoever signs it off. A phone call cannot be forwarded and a photograph of a chalkboard cannot be put in front of a manager.

  8. The occasion

    A room, a date, and one person doing the asking

    An engagement, a fiftieth, a wake, a work thing in December. It is booked weeks ahead by one person on behalf of everybody else, and it is worth more than a whole morning of coffees. They want to know the room, the numbers it holds, whether it can be exclusive and roughly what it runs to. All of that is reading, and reading happens on a website.

  9. Or nothing

    The enquiry that was never made at all

    The menu was a download that would not open. There was no functions page, so they assumed you do not do functions. Nobody rang, nobody emailed, nothing arrived in an inbox to be missed — they moved to the next name and you have no way of ever knowing they were there. Every other kind of business we write for loses customers it could at least count. Yours vanish silently, and they are the largest ones you had.

02 / THE PAGES

Seven pages, and the
question each one is
there to answer.

Three of these exist for one person organising something for other people, which is not a sentence we would write on a page for a plumber. The tier beside each is the tier it starts at, and it matches our pricing exactly.

01
Essential

The menu, as words on a page

What they typeThe dish, or the diet, then the suburb

Every item, every price, in text a phone can enlarge and a search engine can read. This is the single most valuable page a hospitality business can have and it is the one most often missing, because the menu already exists as a print file and the print file went on the site instead. Whatever your kitchen marks on the printed one — gluten free, vegan, dairy free, however you word it — is marked here the same way, in your words, unchanged.

02
Essential

Hours, and the days that are not normal

What they typeYour name, plus open, plus a holiday

The everyday hours, the ones over Christmas and Easter, the day you close for a staff function, and the seasonal change nobody remembers to publish. It is written once in a place you can edit yourself, and we set the same thing on the Google listing in the same pass so the two never disagree — because when they do, the listing is the one people believe.

03
Essential

Finding you, and getting in the door

What they typeYour name, plus parking

Where to leave the car and whether it is timed. Which door, if it is not the one facing the street. Stairs, ramps, the width of the gap, whether a pram or a wheelchair gets through, whether the dog can come. None of it is glamorous and all of it decides whether somebody with a buggy picks you on a wet Sunday.

04
Essential

Bookings, or a straight answer that you do not take them

What they typeYour name, plus book a table

If you use a booking system, it goes on the page where people look for it and works on a phone. If you take them by phone, that is a number and the hours somebody is there to answer it. If you do not take them at all, the page says so in one sentence, which is a real answer and stops the calls. We connect the system you already pay for rather than writing one.

05
Standard

Functions and private hire, with the numbers on it

What they typeFunction venue, plus the suburb

The room, photographed empty and set. How many seated and how many standing. Whether it can be taken exclusively and on which days. Minimum spend if there is one, and the deposit terms. This is the page that turns an idle look into an enquiry, and it is worth more per visit than everything above it put together.

06
Standard

Catering, with a per-head figure and a cut-off

What they typeCatering, or platters, plus the suburb

What you send out, priced per head or per platter, with the notice you need and the area you deliver to. The person reading it is at work and has to forward it to somebody else, so it has to survive being sent as a link. A number on a page also ends the polite email exchange that currently takes four days and sometimes ends in nothing.

07
Standard

The place, and the people who run it

What they typeYour name, on its own

Who started it, what the kitchen cares about, where the coffee comes from, what the building used to be. It is the page nobody asks for and plenty of people read, and it is the difference between a venue somebody books for a fiftieth and one they get a sandwich from. Your own photographs, your own words, and no stock library anywhere near it.

Four of the seven are the Essential tier. If the menu is the only thing that is genuinely wrong — and it often is — say so when you get in touch and we will look at that on its own rather than quote you for seven pages you did not ask for.

04 / THE PROOF

Nobody books a
room they have
not seen.

A tradesman is judged on a registration number and a clinic on a qualification. You are judged on whether the photograph looks like the place, and whether the plate looks like the plate. Every row below is something you already have on a phone in your apron.

The room

Your actual room, empty and full

Taken on a normal Tuesday in the light the room actually has, not by a photographer at eleven in the morning with the chairs moved. Somebody deciding whether to hold a fiftieth in it needs to see it set for one, and needs to see it empty enough to imagine their own people in it. Two dozen honest photographs beat six styled ones and cost nothing.

The plate

What comes out, photographed the way it comes out

Your own food on your own crockery, sized for a phone and kept current. The gap between a stock photograph and what lands on the table is the single quickest way to disappoint somebody who was already on your side, and it is the complaint that ends up in a review. Prune them when the menu changes — an old gallery quietly advertises the kitchen you used to have.

The hours

One set of hours, in two places, always the same

The site and the listing say the same thing, including the holidays, and you can change both without ringing anybody. It sounds like housekeeping and it is closer to a promise: a person who drives to a closed door does not come back next week, and a person who reads that you are open until three and gets asked to leave at half past two feels the same way about it.

The words

What is claimed about the food, and who stands behind it

We build the site around your words. We do not write a dietary claim, invent a gluten-free or a vegan line, describe anything as organic, free range, local or award-winning, or put a hygiene grade on a page unless you have told us it is yours and current. We will say no if we are asked to. That is the kitchen's claim under the Fair Trading Act and under the Food Act, and it is signed off by you before it goes live.

Reviews

The one thing we cannot build and will not invent

Something about the reviews is the most common reason people give for not contacting a local business, ahead of price, and in hospitality it is most of the decision. We will make asking take ten seconds and put the link somewhere near the counter where you will actually use it. We will not write one, buy one, or set up anything that filters the unhappy out on the way. Skyward has no reviews either — we are asking our first clients for one in writing, as part of the deal.

05 / MID SERVICE

Nobody is going
to answer that at
twenty to eight
on a Friday.

The enquiry that is worth the most arrives at the worst possible hour. Somebody is planning a work function, they are doing it after dinner, and the venue they are writing to is in the middle of service with every pair of hands on a plate. It gets read on Sunday, answered on Monday, and by then the person has three replies and has picked one.

What we build for that is an intake flow, and it is deliberately not a chatbot. There is no language model in it. In hospitality that is not a limitation, it is the entire point: a date, a room and a per-head figure are precisely the things a generative bot would invent, and you would be the one standing there on the night with forty people and somebody holding a screenshot of a price you never agreed to.

So it does not agree to anything. It asks a short set of questions you have written, in the order you would ask them: the date, how many people, seated or standing, what they are after, and whether there is anything the kitchen needs to know about. It says what your notice period is if you have given us one. Then it stops, tells them a human will come back with an answer, and gets out of the way.

It says on the first screen that it is an assistant rather than a person, every time, to everybody, and it carries your phone number on every step so anyone who would rather speak to a human can stop and do that immediately. Around eighty-five per cent of people say they would rather deal with a person than with AI, and that figure has been going up rather than down. We are not going to argue with them, and we are not putting a robot in front of your customers.

  • Says it is an assistant on the first screen, every time
  • Your phone number on every step, so it is never the only route out
  • No language model, so it cannot invent a price, a date or a room
  • Confirms nothing and books nothing — that stays with a person
  • Asks the date and the numbers first, so the reply can be a real answer
  • Everything forwarded sorted, ready to price properly after service
06 / WHAT IT COSTS

Flat fees, in public,
with the GST already
in the number.

We have just spent a section asking you to put prices on your menu, so it would be a poor look not to put ours on ours. Most studios here quote plus GST or do not say which, and at fifteen per cent that is not a rounding difference. Every figure below is what you would pay. Nothing is due until you have seen a real working homepage for your venue and said yes to it.

Google Business Profile setup

The map result, claimed, verified, categorised and filled in properly, in a day — photographs, the everyday hours and the holiday ones, the menu link, the attributes people filter on. No website needed and nothing ongoing. For a lot of cafés this is the whole job for now, and it is where we would start.

$395One off

Essential website

Up to four pages. For most venues: the menu in real text, hours and finding you, bookings or a straight answer that you do not take them, and how to get hold of a person. Live in seven days from the point we have your content.

$2,450Founding price $1,950

Standard website

Up to eight pages, which is the one that adds functions, catering and the story of the place. If you want the room hired and the platters ordered, this is the tier where that starts, and it is the one most venues with a private space should be looking at.

$3,450Founding price $2,950

Lead Engine

A page for every service and every area worth having, a local search campaign at launch, the missed-enquiry assistant for twelve months and three months of the care plan. For hospitality this earns its keep where catering or events are a real part of the business rather than a sideline.

$5,950Founding price $5,450

Care plan

Hosting, domain, security, backups, unlimited small edits done within two days — which for you is usually a menu change, a price moved or a holiday added — a monthly tune-up of the Google profile and a report in plain English. No lock-in, cancel whenever, and you still own the site. Pay yearly and two months are free: $1,690.

$169Per month

Missed-enquiry assistant

Added to a site we have built. Set up around your function questions, your notice periods and your hours, then tuned each month as you learn what people actually ask at half past nine. Not sold on its own.

$890then $129 per month

All prices are New Zealand dollars with GST included and nothing added at the end. Websites are half after you have seen your free homepage and said yes, the balance on launch. We do not discount off-menu — if the budget will not stretch we will move you down a tier or start you on the profile instead. Our first ten clients get $500 off any website in exchange for three things written into the job: an honest Google review when we are done, a testimonial we can use, and permission to publish the build as a case study. It is a trade rather than a sale. The full price list.

07 / STRAIGHT UP

What this
does not buy.

Not a position on Google. Nobody can sell you one. Where you appear depends partly on where the person searching is standing, which is nobody's to hand out, and partly on a system that is not published and changes. Anyone guaranteeing you a place in the three is guessing with your money.

Not covers on a Tuesday. A website does not make anybody hungry. What it can do is stop you being ruled out by somebody who could not read the menu, could not find the car park or could not tell whether you do functions — and we have no honest basis for a number on any of that, so there is not one anywhere on this page.

Not claims about your food. We will not write a dietary, allergen, provenance or award claim, and we will not put a hygiene grade on a page unless it is yours and current. We publish what you give us, in your words, and you check it before it goes live. That is the kitchen's responsibility in law and it stays there.

Not a booking system of our own. We connect the one you already use and put it where people look for it. If you would rather take bookings on the phone, or not at all, the site says so plainly instead — which is a better outcome than a form nobody watches.

Not your menu written for you. We will lay it out, mark it the way you mark it and make it editable in two minutes. Deciding what is on it and what it costs is the job you already have.

Not reviews. See section 04. We make asking easy and we go no further than that, in either direction.

Not a lock-in. You own the site, the domain and the content, and you have the logins on day one. The care plan is monthly and can be stopped whenever you like without the site going anywhere.

And not experience we have not had. Skyward is new and there are no clients yet, in any industry. The café in section 09 is one we invented and built ourselves so that there was something to open rather than another paragraph to read — it is not a job we were hired for and it is labelled as such on every screen of it. What is on this page is where a search result stops, what a menu has to survive being read on, and what an enquiry for forty people needs before somebody will send it — all of which you can check against your own week while you read it — not a record we do not have.

08 / QUESTIONS

Six things café
owners ask us,
answered properly.

Everyone finds us on Instagram. Do we actually need a website?

For coffee, no, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. For the function and the catering order, yes, and for a reason that has nothing to do with taste: those are decided by somebody who has to send a link to another person. A post cannot be forwarded to a manager as a quote, and a direct message thread is not something anybody wants to have with a stranger about a budget.

We would not ask you to stop posting. We would ask you to own the page the post points at, so the menu, the room and the numbers live somewhere with one address that cannot be buried by an algorithm or lost when an account goes.

Our menu changes every week. Will the page not always be wrong?

Only if it is built in a way that makes changing it somebody else's job. Ours is built so the menu is a page you edit yourself, on a phone, in about two minutes, and that decision gets made at the start rather than discovered later. If you would rather not touch it at all, the care plan covers it — you text the change and it is done inside two working days.

The one thing we would push back on is going back to a photograph because it is quicker. It is quicker for you and it is the reason the person who cannot eat something is currently ringing you during service.

Honestly — do you just want to sell us the expensive one?

If we did, this page would not open by telling you that most of your day is decided on a listing rather than a website. For a lot of cafés the honest recommendation is the $395 profile, done properly, and nothing else this year. It takes a day, it fixes the photographs and the holiday hours, and it is the thing most likely to be wrong right now.

Where a site earns its money is functions, catering and private hire, because those are read rather than walked past. If none of that is part of your business, say so and we will tell you to save the money. We would rather have that conversation than sell you seven pages and no work.

Can you take our bookings for us?

We connect whatever you already use and make sure it works on a phone and sits where people look for it. What we do not do is write a booking engine, because the ones that exist are better than anything we would build and they already talk to your floor plan and your point of sale.

If you do not take bookings, we would put that in a sentence on the page rather than leave it unsaid. A clear no gets respected. Silence gets a phone call during the lunch rush.

Is that $2,450, or $2,450 plus GST?

$2,450, full stop. Every figure on this site includes GST and nothing is added later. It is worth asking every other quote you get the same question — at fifteen per cent the difference is not a rounding error, and a quote that does not say which it means cannot be compared with one that does.

Have you built a website for a café before?

Not for a client. Skyward is new and has no clients yet, in any industry, and we are not going to bluff to somebody whose whole trade is noticing when something is not what it was described as. What we have built is the café in section 09 — invented from the name down, so that there is a finished page to open instead of a promise about one.

What we do instead is build your homepage first, properly, for nothing, before any money changes hands. You look at a real working page for your own venue and decide from that rather than from somebody else's portfolio. If it is not good you walk away owing us nothing, which is a more useful test than a testimonial. How that works.

09 / SEE ONE

There is one. Send it
to somebody else and
see if it holds up.

Everything above this is a claim about a page you have not seen. This is that page, finished, built on the argument this one has been making: what each table actually seats, the whole menu marked line by line, the group rules as four figures, and a section of things the café will not do. Nobody is behind it. We invented a café so that we could build the thing properly rather than wait for permission to build it.

Gannet is not a real café.

The café, the room, the menu and every figure on that page were made up so that there was something to build. Open it and a black band sits across the top of the screen saying exactly that, and it stays there the whole way down. The page is marked noindex, so it cannot surface in a search for somebody's actual local. The phone number is fictional, the email address ends in .example — a domain reserved so that it can never belong to anybody — and nothing typed into its form is sent or stored.

The dietary marks on that page are invented along with the menu they sit on, and they are there to show how a real one would be laid out and counted, not as anything anybody should act on. The two lines in quotation marks are sample text and each says so directly underneath itself — one of them is a complaint, on purpose, because a page built to be forwarded has to be able to carry one. Skyward has no reviews of its own, and yours are yours to earn rather than ours to write.

01
Café · Point Chevalier

Gannet

Built toBe forwarded to ten other people and still hold

It is written for the one person who got handed the job, which is the reader 01 on this page is about — so nothing on it is aimed at somebody wondering where to get a coffee. The room comes first as furniture rather than atmosphere: the long table that seats twelve and cannot be shortened, the only two tables in the building that push together, and the courtyard that is the biggest space and the least reliable one. Then the whole menu as real text with the marks in the line and the counts printed underneath, so nobody has to read all of it to find out whether there is anything for them. Then the group rules as four figures on a dark band, one of which is a zero. It ends on six things the café will not do, including two that lose it a booking, because a page somebody forwards has to survive being read by a stranger.Open the café concept

Yours would not look like this one, and it should not. A café with one long table has a different argument to a restaurant taking bookings at seven, and neither of them is a bakery whose whole question is what is left at four o'clock. What carries across is the method: work out the single thing the person came to find out, put it first, and take everything else out of their way. The rest of the concept builds are indexed on the homepage — the trades, a physiotherapy clinic, a mobile mechanic and a hair salon. Worth opening if you want to see how far apart sites built by the same studio can be.

ALSO WRITTEN

Four more places
to start, depending
on what you are.

Whatever kind of local business you are, the method does not change — find out what people type, answer it properly on a page of its own, and make the next step obvious.

$395

The map result, dressed properly, in a day.

The photographs, the holiday hours and the attributes people filter on, all of which decide more of your week than your website does. What is in a listing, what goes wrong in one, and what $395 does not buy.

 Clinics

Physio, dental, chiro and counselling, which are nothing like this.

Somebody who decided six weeks ago, has been putting it off ever since and still has not got as far as a time in the diary. Written for the gap between deciding and booking.

 Salons

Hair, barbering and beauty, sold by a photograph.

Written for the ten seconds between somebody liking the work and getting a name in the diary, which is a handover rather than a search — and for the price list that decides it.

 Mobile

Mechanics, groomers and cleaners who come to the customer.

No address at all, just a boundary on a map, and a business that can lose money by winning the wrong enquiry. The opposite problem to having a room people have to find.
09 / START

We will build your
homepage first.
Then you decide.

Send us the name of the place and what you are trying to fix. We will look at what is already out there under your name — the listing, the photographs, whether the menu can be read on a phone — and tell you honestly whether a website is the answer. If it is, we build you a real, working homepage, not a mock-up or a template with your logo dropped on it, and send it to you. If you do not like it, that is the end of it and you owe nothing. No deposit before the demo.

Phone or text022 584 0585 Emailjosh@skywarddigital.co.nz Or start at $395The Google profile, on its own

Josh reads these himself. Nothing is passed to a salesperson, because there is not one. Text is usually easier than a call if you are on the floor all day.

We use these details only to reply to your enquiry and, if you go ahead, to run the job. We don't sell them, we don't add you to a mailing list, and you can ask us to delete them any time by emailing Josh. Please don't send us anything about your customers or their bookings through this form — it isn't the place for it, and we don't want it. The full privacy statement says who else handles them and for how long.