The client
Café Capitolino is a café and gelateria on Republic Street in Valletta, beside the Law Courts and opposite St John’s Co-Cathedral. It opens at 6:30 every weekday morning and stays open until nine on Friday and Saturday nights. It has a 4.1 rating on TripAdvisor and a 96% recommendation score on Facebook. Until September 2026 it had no website at all.
What they wanted
The brief was the job the sign outside the door already does, done properly on a phone:
- Answer the three questions a visitor asks in ten seconds: what is on the menu and what it costs, when it is open, and where exactly it is.
- Look as good as the place. Valletta is the product; the site had to show it.
- Cost nothing to keep. No monthly platform fee, no plugins to update, nothing to break while the owner is making coffee.
What stood in the way
The best asset was a drone film of Valletta, and it weighed 12 MB, which is unusable on a tourist’s mobile data. The hours differ by day, so the site had to show a real weekly schedule rather than “open daily”. And there was no existing copy, photography or menu file to start from: everything on the page had to be written and structured from scratch.
What we delivered
One page, done properly, live at cafecapitolino.com:
- A menu in text, with prices. Espresso at €1.50, cappuccino at €2.50, gelato from €3.00 to €5.50, beers, wines, smoothies and milkshakes, plus a note that Maltese pastizzi and pastries are available inside. Text, not a PDF, so Google and AI assistants can read it.
- Hours by day and a map link. Monday to Thursday 6:30 to 19:00, Friday and Saturday until 21:00, Sunday from 8:00, with the address and a one-tap Google Maps link.
- The ratings, shown. The TripAdvisor and Facebook scores sit on the page as proof.
- The drone hero, cut from 12 MB to 5.8 MB and driven by scroll, so it plays instantly on a phone outside the door.
- Copy in the café’s voice, casual and short. “Nothing complicated” is the line that sets the tone.
- A “Lately” section for social updates, so the page stays alive without a developer.
What it produced
The site scores 100 on Lighthouse for accessibility, best practices and SEO, and costs about €10 a year to run, which is the domain. It went live in September 2026. Search numbers belong on this page too; we will add them once the site has 90 days of Search Console data, and not before.
What this means for you
This is the €500 Starter site in practice: one page, fast, findable, built around what a customer needs at the moment they decide. If you run a café, restaurant, bar or shop in Malta and have no site, or a Facebook page standing in for one, ask for the free 72-hour demo and we will build yours the same way.