Silver Dollar Saloon, Historic Steakhouse Online Presence

One of the oldest continuously operating saloons west of the Rockies. The kitchen was modern, the bar was full most nights, but the website still lived in 2014 – desktop-only, no reservations, and a catering enquiry form that bounced to an Outlook inbox no one watched.

Reservations were leaking to OpenTable because the site had no way to book a table. Catering, event hire and the Grand Hotel tour upstairs all shared the same generic contact form, with no qualification fields – so the team had to call back every lead to figure out what they actually wanted.

• Site bounced on mobile – 71% of traffic, but the layout broke below 768 px.
• Reservations sent to OpenTable – 18% commission on every covered head.
• Catering, events and Grand Hotel tours all funnelled into one contact form with no triage.
• Local SEO was thin – ranking page 2 for “Marysville steakhouse” despite owning the category since 1858.

The design language pulls from the original 1858 signage, brass fittings and gold-foil typography, but the underlying flows are modern – mobile-first reservations, segmented enquiry forms for each revenue stream, and a heritage story told as a scrollable photo essay rather than a static “About” wall of text.

• WordPress
• Next.js
• Reservations integration
• Schema.org LocalBusiness

We should have commissioned the drone footage of the Grand Hotel in week one, not week five. The hero video shipped late and the launch hero had to ride on a still until the cut was ready. Lesson: any non-text asset with an external dependency moves to week-one acquisition.