Carbone's Pizza: One Website for Two Buffalo Kitchens
Carbone's Pizza runs two kitchens on opposite sides of Buffalo, and almost every visitor wants exactly one of them. Here is how the site is put together, what it still loads, and what is still open.
What Carbone's Does
Carbone's Pizza is a Buffalo pizzeria with two kitchens: 568 South Park Ave in 14204 and 1126 E. Lovejoy St. in 14206. The menu runs pizza, chicken wings, boneless wings, subs, chicken fingers, salads, tacos and wraps, party platters, sides and drinks.
The history on the site belongs to the family, not to us. On their own Our Story page, Nicholas Carbone writes that Carbone's Pizza was started in 1978 by his grandparents, Dominic and Carrie Carbone. The same page says Carbone's has donated subs every Wednesday for the last five years to Friends Feeding Friends, a Buffalo non-profit. Those are Carbone's accomplishments. We built the website that carries them.
The Two-Location Problem
A single-location restaurant puts one address and one phone number in the header and it is done. Two locations turn that header into a question.
Carbone's sharpens the question in a useful way. Both stores keep the same menu and the same hours, Sunday through Thursday 11am to 11pm and Friday and Saturday 11am to 12am, so the choice is never about what is open. It is only about which kitchen is closer.
The site does not pick for them. Both addresses and both phone numbers appear on the home page, and the Locations page keeps each address with the number that rings that kitchen: 568 South Park Ave answers at 716-855-1749, and 1126 E. Lovejoy St. answers at 716-897-5098. A hungry person does not debug a wrong number. They call somewhere else.
Ordering lives off the site. Carbone's points pickup and delivery at their Carbone's Pizza 716 mobile app, so the pages exist to answer where, when, what and how much, then get out of the way.
What the Site Runs
Being straight about the stack: the home page loads eight stylesheets and seven scripts, among them Bootstrap, jQuery, Tether, Owl Carousel, mCustomScrollbar, Font Awesome and Animate.css. Credit where it is due: the dependencies are coherent. jquery.min.js is present, so the jQuery-dependent plugins have the library they expect.
Still, a carousel, a custom scrollbar, an icon font, an animation library and a share widget is more than a pizzeria menu needs, and consolidating them is on the list. Fewer files is a maintenance argument, less to update and less to break. It is not a speed claim, because we have not measured this site's load times. It is how we would approach any small business website from the start.
The Decisions, and Why
One address per menu category
The sitemap lists 17 URLs and ten of them are menu categories, from pizza and chicken wings through subs, salads, party platters and sides. Plenty of restaurant sites bury the menu in a PDF or stack it into one endless scroll, which is fine on a laptop and painful on a phone.
Giving each category its own address means somebody looking for wings lands on a page about wings and reads it without pinching and dragging, which is most of what responsive design has to deliver. Whether those pages rank is a separate question, and we have no data claiming they do. Building the page a search deserves before worrying about position is how we handle search engine optimization.
Specials, combos and the deals list
Weekly specials and pizza and wing combos get their own pages, because a promotion someone might text to a friend needs an address of its own. The section headed "Don't Miss Carbone's Deals" feeds the site's only form, a newsletter signup that posts to Mailchimp. An email list is the one audience channel the owner controls.
What Is Still Open
The home page has no H1 element. Its only H2 is the deals heading. The site publishes no structured data at all, so nothing describes either store in a form a search engine can read as a stated fact instead of inferring it. For a two-location restaurant that is the most obvious gap, and the first thing we would fix.
We will not call this site's search presence strong, because it is not there yet, and we will not dress eight stylesheets up as a design choice.
Accessibility sits on the same list. We will not call any website compliant, here or anywhere. A heading outline is where an accessibility review begins, and this one needs the outline before anything else.
See It Live
The site is at Carbone's Pizza, with both locations, the menu by category and the family's own account of 1978. More work sits in the portfolio.
Do You Run More Than One Location?
If two addresses and two phone numbers are confusing your customers, we will look at how your site presents them.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does the Carbone's Pizza site load today?
Eight stylesheets and seven scripts, among them Bootstrap, jQuery, Owl Carousel, mCustomScrollbar, Tether, Font Awesome and Animate.css. That is a description of the asset stack, not a speed claim. Consolidating it is on the list, and we would rather say so plainly than call the site lean.
How does one website serve two Carbone's locations?
One brand, two addresses, two phone numbers. Carbone's runs 568 South Park Ave and 1126 E. Lovejoy St., both in Buffalo, and both appear on the home page. The Locations page keeps each address with the phone number that rings that kitchen and the hours it keeps, so nobody has to guess which store they just called.
Does the home page have an H1 or structured data?
No. The home page carries no H1 element, its only H2 is the deals heading, and the site publishes no JSON-LD structured data at all. Both are open items, and we are naming them here rather than leaving them out, because a case study that lists only wins is a brochure.
Does AldoMedia claim any of Carbone's history, recipes or charity work?
No. The 1978 founding by Dominic and Carrie Carbone, the family account written by Nicholas Carbone, the sauce recipe and the weekly sub donations to Friends Feeding Friends all belong to Carbone's Pizza. AldoMedia built the website that presents them.