🍽️Yayla Yemek Evi

Yayla Yemek Evi is the website of an authentic village restaurant in Pamuklu, North Cyprus. It presents the restaurant's natural products and traditional dishes with an interactive gallery, customer reviews, Google Maps directions and quick contact options.

The brief

This project had a real client. The restaurant's story — village cooking and local ingredients — deserved more than a social media page: a fast, welcoming site that answers a visitor's three questions (what do you cook, where are you, how do I reach you) within seconds, on any phone.

The audience shaped every constraint: customers of a village restaurant span all ages and devices, often deciding where to eat right now from a phone on mobile data. Nothing on the site could depend on the newest browser or the fastest connection.

Technical architecture

The site is built with React and TypeScript on Vite and styled with Tailwind CSS. It is a fully static, fast-loading front end: the photo gallery is the centerpiece, Google Maps is embedded for directions, customer reviews build trust, and calling or messaging the restaurant is one tap away. The visual language follows the restaurant's warm, rustic identity instead of a generic template.

Challenges and what I learned

Building for a real business is different from building for yourself. I had to translate a non-technical owner's wishes into concrete design decisions, present the food in a way that actually sells it, and keep the site effortless on the phones most customers use.

On the technical side, the gallery drove the constraints: food photography is the whole argument, so the images had to look rich while the page stayed fast on mobile data — a balance of sizing, format and loading order rather than any single trick.

It was a lesson in client communication, scoping and finishing: the site is only done when the owner is happy and the customers find what they came for. Seeing a local business represented properly online made this one of the most satisfying projects to ship.