Smoke & Slaw: a brand voice and website for a BBQ that comes to you

Smoke & Slaw is a mobile BBQ catering business in Abergavenny, run by Steve. It cooks low and slow: brisket, pulled pork and smokehouse sausage, smoked overnight and served from a counter at weddings, parties and pop-ups across South Wales. Steve needed a website that matched the food, and a voice to go with it. He had neither.

The outcome

Before this, Smoke & Slaw had a holding page. No real website, no brand voice, no copy, just a logo. We built the tone of voice and the positioning from scratch, then designed and shipped a six-page website that earns enquiries and looks after itself. The whole thing, including the SEO and Google Search Console setup, went live in a single session.

Delivered:

• A brand voice and positioning, written from scratch
• A six-page website, vibe-coded and deploy-ready, with no CMS to maintain
• A working enquiry form and a WhatsApp link on every page
• A pop-ups page that hides past dates automatically
• A full SEO setup: metadata, schema, sitemap and Search Console, live from day one
• Light ongoing support, including uploading new pop-up dates as they are confirmed

The challenge

Steve runs the business on his own, cooks the food himself, and has no technical background. The site had to do two jobs at once: look as good as the food tastes, and stay out of his way.

Three things to solve:

• No brand, no voice. A logo, and nothing else. The tone, the language and the positioning all had to be set before a word of copy could be written.
• High-value enquiries. Weddings are the booking that matters most, with private and corporate events close behind. The site had to earn those enquiries and make them easy to send.
• One person, no spare time. Whatever we built, Steve had to be able to run it himself, with no developer on call.

The brief was just as clear on what Smoke & Slaw is not. It is not a polished events company. It is a proper BBQ that happens to cater events. The voice had to carry that: dry, plain, confident and British. No clichés, no hard sell.

Our approach

We started with the voice, because everything else leans on it.

Voice and positioning:

• The food is the event. The idea at the centre of it. Smoke & Slaw does not style itself as a caterer. It is a BBQ that comes to you, and the copy never lets you forget it.
• Dry and understated. UK English throughout, plain language, no inflated claims. The food does the talking.
• Honest about scope. No guest numbers and no prices on the site. The job of the copy is to start a conversation, not to close a sale.

From there we built the site.

The build:

• A real enquiry form. The original faked its success message and sent nothing. We replaced it with a genuine integration that emails every enquiry straight to Steve, with WhatsApp as a one-tap alternative on every page.
• A pop-ups page that stays current on its own. We upload each new run of dates as a small ongoing support job, and the page hides events automatically once they have passed, so it never shows a gig that has already happened and never needs Steve to touch it.
• No CMS, by choice. For a one-person business, a content management system is overhead, not a feature. There is nothing for Steve to log into and nothing to break, and the few updates the site needs, such as new pop-up dates, we handle for him.
• A dark, high-contrast design. Black backgrounds and white type with a single red accent, set in Oswald and Inter. The look matches the food: no frills, high quality.

Vibe-coded, not templated

The site was vibe-coded with Claude Code. We described what we wanted and shaped it in real time, rather than dragging blocks around a page builder or typing every line by hand. For a business whose whole pitch is doing one thing properly, a template would have undercut the message. A custom build matched it, and AI-assisted coding made that custom build fast.

What that gave Smoke & Slaw:

• Custom, at template speed. A bespoke, brand-matched site, produced in a fraction of the usual time, with no theme to fight and no platform to lock into.
• Brand fidelity throughout. Colour, type and layout pulled straight from the voice work, not approximated to fit a theme.
• Fast and self-sufficient. Static, quick to load, and simple enough for a one-person business to run.
• Room to grow. Clean, structured code the site can expand into as the business takes on more.

This is the point worth stating plainly. Alchemy builds brand-faithful, custom websites at the speed people expect from templates, using AI-assisted coding to get there, without the compromises a template forces.

SEO from the first line

Most small-business sites bolt SEO on later, if they do it at all. This one had it from the start.

• Titles, meta descriptions, Open Graph and Twitter cards across all six pages
• LocalBusiness and FoodEstablishment schema on the homepage, so search engines understand the address, the area served and the cuisine
• FAQ schema on the key pages, which makes Smoke & Slaw eligible for FAQ rich snippets in search results
• A sitemap and robots.txt, submitted to Google Search Console and indexed before launch, with all six pages discovered

A small site, with the technical groundwork of a much larger one.

What it does for Smoke & Slaw

Smoke & Slaw now has a website that looks the way the food tastes, and a voice that sounds like Steve. It earns wedding and event enquiries, makes them easy to send, and keeps the pop-up schedule current on his behalf. It is fast, it is easy to find, and it is built so a one-person business can run it without thinking about it. The brand work set the tone, and the build kept faith with it.

See the finished site at smokeandslaw.co.uk.