Building a Square site for small business: La Trenza Tacos

Show me what you’re workin’ with

Carolina and Carlos own and operate La Trenza Tacos in the historic Wincey Mills market in Paris, Ontario. I met them in January of 2023 and helped them apply for Digital Main Street’s $2500 Digital Transformation Grant, with which they purchased an iPad and branding photography. They’re extremely fun/funny and a joy to work with. Carolina is all business, super animated, and handles all the front end business stuff. Carlos is down tempo, laid back and task-oriented, a real back of house character who’s responsible for all the food prep and cooking. Oh, and don’t get me started on the tacos or the pico de gallo.

Choosing a platform

This part was easy. Carolina uses a Square POS system in-house, and had a placeholder site for La Trenza (with hours and location and not much else) so she wanted to stay with the Square Up platform to keep things consistent and in one place. Square isn’t the most versatile web platform, but its integrated e-commerce functionality is so convenient that it makes it a no-brainer for small businesses who don’t want to be fussed with integrating multiple service providers; always a headache.

Interested in a Square site for your small business to build your e-commerce capabilities? Reach out to schuyler@eatprayshoot.com with your budget.

Before we get going

I usually begin a new web design project in 2 ways. Firstly, I start a shared doc with the client where they can share their story and any relevant photos or images. At the same time I start looking at their competition. In this case I took a look at what other taco shops in Southern Ontario were doing with their sites, and consider which ideas might be effective for La Trenza, as well as which to avoid.

However, in this case, since I was working with Square and its limited mutability as a platform, I just decided to make everything as clear and direct as I could, and start the user’s buying journey as quickly as possible (ie., the homepage.)

But I did still familiarize myself with other taco shops’ sites to get a look at what type of typography and colour palettes they were using. This bold example was one of my favourites: https://goodtaco.ca/ but as you can see, the site doesn’t really seem all that Mexican. More like a Canadian re-telling of Mexican cuisine. Carlos and Carolina were born and raised in Oaxaca, and also lived in Veracruz and Cancun. They’re as Mexican as it gets, and I wanted their site to reflect their lives and heritage.

A false start

These colours ended up being a little too bold, however, for a Square site. Like I said above, Square isn’t as customizable as WordPress or some other web platforms, and though my example site https://goodtaco.ca/ uses big, bright, clashing colours on their homepage, their site is built on Squarespace which allows customizability like that.

So, back to the drawing board.

Typography

There’s a Google font called Averia Libre that I knew I wanted to use for blocks of text. It has a cool handmade feel that reminded me of a small taco shop painting their logo and menu on the exterior of their building. It looks both slightly weathered but also applied with love.

So what I needed to find was a complementary typeface for headings and titles. That’s where I would go with a traditional Mexican feel. A quick search on Creative Market for “Mexico” garnered an hour’s worth of results, but eventually I narrowed it down to 3 that I really liked, and fortunately only See De Mayo really worked alongside Averia Libre, so that made my choice for me.

Design elements

The next step is collecting graphic elements. I wanted a few pieces of flair to adorn the site with that would instantly give users a feel for what they’re looking at: authentic Mexican food.

Freepik had some graphic elements that looked great, and were even downloadable in .ai (Adobe Illustrator) format. I took them into Illustrator and got rid of shadows and highlights to give them a flatter appearance. My intention was to create banners so I wanted to decrease their dimensionality a bit. 3D images in background banners might be a little distracting. This is what I ended up with, with the centre notched out to allow for titles and buttons:

It was from these elements that I derived the colour palette, focussing mostly on the green/white/red of the Mexican flag, as well as the pale background colour which reminded me of a corn tortilla and wouldn’t compete with dark lettering. I also took the blue colour from the music note up there to create a water background for the About page banner. In short, these graphic elements had everything I needed to get started.

Copy

As I mentioned above, the first thing I did on this project was open a shared document where Carolina could talk about herself, her brother, their mother, Mexico, and their business journey. All that information became the basis for La Trenza’s About page.

Doing research to populate a small business’ site copy is a lot like having a great, in-depth conversation. Web developers should always remember that. Let the client share and speak freely about whatever they like. The more specific that conversation gets, the more their site will stand apart. It’s our job as designers/copywriters to synthesize all that info and make it pop.

Pops of colour

Carolina’s only design guidance was “we like simple perhaps a white background, with pops of colour through photos or food images?” so I decided to break up sections with banners and other elements.

The Square platform offers scrolling banners to break up sections as well. You can see this on La Trenza’s homepage.

These are a smart little trick for restaurants because every word you include acts as a keyword, so you can even include items that you don’t technically offer. For instance, in the case of La Trenza, we could have included birria tacos, which they don’t currently offer, but does tell a web searcher that La Trenza has authentic Mexican food. I know this is a bit of a dastardly trick, but the upside is, customers are always apt to forgive you as long as your food is delicious!

Customer testimonials

Google’s customer testimonial photos are user-submitted and always of varying quality. Since I wanted a uniform look for La Trenza’s website, I decided to put together a few custom icons.

First, I chose testimonials based on keywords (“authentic tacos” and “fresh, locally sourced ingredients”) then created icons based on them. So the “authentic tacos” testimonial has a taco, and “local ingredients” has ingredients. Pretty simple.

Sign up

When I started designing the site, I hadn’t yet stressed to Carolina how effective e-newsletters are. Almost no small business owner I’ve ever encountered wants to maintain an e-newsletter regimen, but if they understood the potential ROI, which outclasses all the other digital marketing methods, they certainly would. Whether you plan to institute an e-newsletter program now, later, or never, start capturing your customers’ contact info with a sign up area.

Interested in more information about e-newsletters, email blasts, and direct digital marketing to your customers? Reach out to schuyler@eatprayshoot.com.

Our Suppliers page

This page works in conjunction with your About Us page, which is the most visited page on your site. If you don’t have enough content for both, just populate your About Us page with as much personal information as you’re comfortable sharing. That’s you, your history, your family (if they’re involved), and your values.

La Trenza had a special opportunity to include an Our Suppliers page, as they get most of their ingredients locally, and in the case of their meat, it comes from about 15 feet away. It’s a great place to have some outbound links to their suppliers. It may seem antithetical to promote other businesses on your website but it satisfies your 3 audiences as a small business.

• Existing customers – they get to know their food a little better and if they have the information to share, are more likely to become ambassadors for your brand.
• Potential customers – they learn a little more about your values and their interest in your food is piqued.
• Your suppliers – they’re grateful for the shout-out and support.

That’s the trifecta.

TIP: Be sure to link to your suppliers’ websites and their social media accounts. Websites for info, social media for likes and interconnectivity. It’s that interconnectivity that builds community and strengthens and benefits both of your businesses.

Square Up

I’m not going to go through La Trenza’s site page by page, but please do pop over and have a look. Or better yet, if you’re in the area, stop in and taste their food.

Unfortunately Carolina didn’t have the budget for new product photography. You can check out some of our product photography work HERE if you’d like.

I also finished things up by adding alt text to all the site’s photos, as well as meta descriptions and meta tags for each page.

And that’s a wrap! Or, a taco, if you’d prefer.

Visit eatprayshoot.com for info about web design and e-commerce functionality for small businesses, as well as a host of other digital marketing services. We work regularly in Paris, St. George, Burford, and other communities in and around the County of Brant.