The Challenge
Café NAS sits inside the National Art School campus in Darlinghurst, in the sandstone buildings that were once Darlinghurst Gaol. A quiet courtyard, heritage walls, and a chef cooking European brunch. The location is the best thing about the café and it was also the reason nobody came.
People walking down Forbes Street assumed the campus was closed to the public, or that the café only served students. Foot traffic was never going to solve that on its own, and there was no website to correct the assumption. Anyone in Sydney searching for brunch nearby had no way of finding a café sitting behind a heritage gate. Ordering and bookings happened at the counter, so a group of six had to call during the middle of service to organise anything.
What We Built
A WordPress and Elementor site built around one idea: get found, then get the order. Home, About Us, Gallery, Contact, and a Things to Do section, all leading to the same two actions.
Online ordering and table bookings both run through order-now.app. The Order Online button is fixed in the header on every page, and it repeats on each dish card on the home page, so a guest can order from wherever they stop scrolling instead of hunting for a button at the bottom.
The menu was a small decision that saved ongoing work. The kitchen changes it with the seasons, so building it out as an Elementor page would have meant a rebuild every few months. Instead the menu link in the navigation points straight at the PDF. The chef uploads a new file, the link stays the same, and nothing needs redesigning.
The food photography does most of the selling. Every gallery dish is named rather than left as a generic image: folded chorizo eggs, baked Spanish eggs, salmon bruschetta, tomato rigatoni, Vannella burrata, Sicilian olive bruschetta. Guests see exactly what they are getting, and Google gets real dish names to index instead of file numbers.
For search, the pages were written around what Sydney actually types. Best cafe near me. Hidden gem cafe Sydney. Group brunch Darlinghurst. Page titles, headings and copy were built on those phrases rather than on the café’s own name, since almost nobody was searching for the café by name yet.
The Explore More Around Us section came out of the same thinking. It links to the NAS Gallery, the Sydney Jewish Museum and Qtopia Sydney, all within a short walk. Local search works on how tightly a business is tied to the places around it, and visitors planning a morning in Darlinghurst now find a café attached to the landmarks they were already looking up.
Smaller things that cut phone calls: opening hours list the kitchen close times separately, 8am to 4pm with the kitchen closing at 3, and Saturday 9:15am to 3pm with the kitchen closing at 2:30. The Instagram feed sits in the footer, so the site keeps showing new food even in months when nothing else changes.
The Results
Café NAS now has an address people find before they find the gate. The line that used to need explaining in person, that the café is open to everyone and not only to students, is the first thing the site says.
Group brunches get booked online instead of over a phone at the busiest hour. Orders come through the same platform the counter already uses, so nothing changed for the staff. And a café that relied entirely on being stumbled upon now turns up for people searching Darlinghurst before they have ever heard its name.
