SOL (solsocial.co.ke) is a restaurant and lounge at Langata Hub, Langata Road. Mornings are breakfast and coffee; nights each have their own name and crowd: Sol Food on Tuesday, SOL Sista & Karaoke on Wednesday, SOL Live on Thursday, SOL City on Friday, SOL Society on Saturday and Sunset at SOL on Sunday. Before this project, all of that lived on Instagram.
The home page on a Sunday: tonight’s night, who’s on, and whether tables are free.
The brief
Show people what’s on tonight, let them book without phoning, and give the team a simple way to see who’s coming. And it had to feel like SOL: elegant, full of their own photos, never like a template.
What we built
- A home page that follows the week. The full-screen photo, the night’s name and who’s playing change by themselves each day.
- A weekly lineup read from Instagram. SOL posts “This week at SOL” as usual; the site reads the post and puts each act and poster on the right night. Staff can paste a caption by hand when needed.
- Two kinds of booking. Breakfast, lunch and dinner are free to book for any group size, and the staff confirm them. Night tables, for 5 or for 10, are held with a deposit through an M-Pesa prompt on the guest’s phone, and the deposit goes toward food and drinks.
- The real menu, 63 items from SOL’s kitchen and SOL Hour cocktail menus, with photos where SOL has them. Delivery orders go to SOL’s Uber Eats store.
- An installable app with notifications, a welcome page ready for SOL’s guest Wi-Fi, and an email list guests can join from any page.
- A staff app. Tonight’s room drawn table by table, new bookings and payments popping up with a sound, a calendar of every day, M-Pesa payments month by month with an Excel download, the week’s lineup, and one screen to send an offer by email and app notification.
How it’s built
Node.js and SQLite on Render, with no framework to slow it down. M-Pesa Daraja STK Push for deposits, web push for notifications, SMTP email from SOL’s own domain, and schema plus a sitemap submitted to Google Search Console.
Where it is now
The site is live at solsocial.co.ke, and we keep shipping to it week by week: 78 updates since 3 November, from the staff app’s redesign to the email list. M-Pesa deposits switch from test mode to live once SOL’s Paybill is connected.
Run a restaurant, café or lounge?
We build websites that show tonight, take the booking, and give your team one screen to run the night.
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