Every networking group's website says it is friendly. Until the first weekend of October, so did ours, and it was about as convincing as everyone else's.
Business Brew is the breakfast networking group I started in 2023. We meet every Wednesday at eight, in the room at eSpace North in Littleport one week and on Zoom the next, and the whole point of it is that it is a networking group people genuinely enjoy attending: no referral quotas, no committee roles, a home-made breakfast and a good deal of lively conversation.
The trouble is that “friendly” is the one word every group uses, so saying it on a website proves nothing. The brief I wrote myself asked for “more fun with fun brew-related little features”, “not corporate at all” and “a super modern website taking advantage of everything there is”. Beneath all of that sat one rule: prove the friendliness rather than announce it.
| Client | Business Brew, the networking group I founded in 2023 |
|---|---|
| What it is | A friendly breakfast networking group for business owners around Ely, meeting every Wednesday at eight |
| Platform | WordPress with a hand-built theme, a small plugin that draws the meeting rota from the group's own app, and WooCommerce with Stripe for paid visits |
| What I did | The idea, the design, the copy and the build on the Saturday, then speed, search and the members' directory on the Sunday |
| The website | businessbrew.org (opens in a new tab) |
Everything it said was true.
The old homepage was tidy, and it worked. It had a large photograph of the room, a headline with one word picked out in colour, a strip of three numbers, a grid of small icons and three numbered cards explaining how to book. Every word of it was true, yet with the logo swapped it could have been any group in any town, or indeed a good many websites that are not networking groups at all.
The table, seen from above.
The new homepage is our table at eSpace North on a Wednesday morning, seen from above, and everything a visitor needs to know is written on something you could pick up.
The headline is a place card. The price is a till receipt that prints itself as the page loads: a home-made breakfast, a proper brew, sixty seconds of fame, a ten-minute spotlight and “a roomful of mates” are each rung up at nothing, and only the visitor pass carries a charge. Beside it, a coral RESERVED card holds the next in-person Wednesday, with a countdown to when the kettle goes on.
Further along the table there is the running order for the morning, a menu card, the house rules, a sign-in sheet of upcoming Wednesdays, members' name cards, quotes written on napkins, a few photograph prints, the latest blog posts on ruled notepaper and a leaflet of the questions people ask before their first visit. It is playful, but none of it is decoration for its own sake. Each object carries something a nervous first-timer actually wants to know: what it costs, what happens and when, what there is to eat, who will be there and how to book.
It would have been easy to overdo, so there are no imitation handwriting fonts, and the headings use a chunky, soft serif, chosen because it is the closest free match to the lettering in the Business Brew logo.
Real things only.
The rule beneath all of it was that nothing goes on the table unless it is real.
The breakfast photographs are of Sally's actual breakfasts, food she really cooked for us: her pastries, granola pots, fruit, and the waffles that sit at the top of the page. Sally runs La Cucina Italiana; she is a member and a professional chef, so the menu card lists a few of her regulars and says plainly that what is on the plate changes from one breakfast to the next. The room in the photographs is our room, and the faces on the name cards are members' own photographs. Anyone who has not uploaded one is shown a photograph of a brew rather than a grey silhouette.
While tidying up, I also found that the theme was still carrying a stock photograph of a full English, which is nothing like what Sally cooks, and a group photograph that turned out to be our old Cambridge group, and both have now gone.
The quotes on the napkins are things members and visitors really said, including this one from Helena, of Helrica Massage, after her first morning with us:
“I have told so many people about my experience this morning and I only left the room two hours ago. I would love to be a member of this friendly group.”
That does more for the word “friendly” than any headline I could write.
A sign-in sheet that fills itself.
The part I am most pleased with is the sign-in sheet, because it never needs updating. The next eight Wednesdays come straight from the members' app the group already runs on, so each one shows whether it is in the room or on Zoom, who is giving the ten-minute spotlight, and a button to book it. When the rota changes in the app, the website changes with it, and nobody has to remember to edit a page.
The same dates are given to Google as proper event listings, which gives the group a better chance of appearing when someone searches for networking in Ely. The Zoom weeks also have a line of their own, because people really have joined from their cars, from a Wetherspoons and, once, from Torrevieja in Spain.
One tap to a seat.
Every booking button on the site opens the same small window. Opened from the top of the page, it ticks the next in-person Wednesday for you and totals it up, just as the receipt does. In-person visits are paid by card there and then, breakfast included; Zoom weeks are free, with the link sent by email; and nobody can book a seat at the table without paying for it. Once they have, they appear in the members' app automatically, so I know who is coming before the kettle goes on.
That part I left untouched, because it already worked, and a redesign is no excuse to break the part that takes the money.
Sunday was for speed.
Most people find Business Brew from a post on LinkedIn or Facebook, on their phone, often on the way somewhere, so a page that is slow on a phone is a page that loses them.
When the new design first went live on the Saturday, it scored 65 out of 100 for performance on Google's Lighthouse phone test. One cause was easily overlooked: a caching plugin was lazy-loading the very first picture on the page, so the main content took about six and a half seconds to appear on Lighthouse's simulated phone connection. The page was also making 32 requests and weighing 635KB.
The Sunday was given over to putting that right. The fonts now come from the site itself rather than from Google, the photographs are WebP and sized for each screen, and the shop and membership plugins no longer load their scripts on pages that do not use them, so the homepage runs on one small script. Running the test again on the Monday gave 99 for performance and 100 for accessibility, best practices and SEO, with the main content showing in about two seconds and the whole page down to 13 requests and 253KB.
The tidying nobody sees.
A redesign is also the right moment to deal with what has gathered out of sight. The members' directory used to rely on an add-on that had fallen out of date and charged for its updates, so it has been rebuilt into the group's own small plugin. It works the same way for members, including the tick box for anyone who would rather not be listed, and it puts the fullest profiles first.
With only one group now, the separate Ely page was saying the same things as the homepage, so it has gone, with its old web address and an even older Littleport one redirecting to the homepage, so that nobody's bookmark breaks. The old theme is still installed, switched off, so going back would take one click if anything ever went badly wrong.
What I would take from this.
I have been building websites since 2001, and the simplest test I know is this: if you were to put a competitor's logo on your homepage and it still made sense, your website would be describing your trade rather than your business. The remedy is rarely cleverer wording; it is evidence: the actual room, the actual food, the actual people and the actual dates, in a form only you could have published. Most businesses have far more of it than they think.
Where it stands.
The new site has been live at businessbrew.org (opens in a new tab) since Saturday 3 October, with the speed work, the new directory and the search tidy-up following on the Sunday.
If your website could belong to anyone in your line of work, I would be glad if you would tell me about it. If you run a business anywhere near Ely, you would be most welcome to come and have breakfast with us (opens in a new tab); there is a seat for you.