Take Out CLT

Using:

Updated on: December 3rd, 2023

Take Out CLT is a project started during the COVID-19 crisis to help the people of Charlotte NC, and the restaurants of Charlotte, band together and do what they could to try and keep restaurants alive while they were mandated to be shut down.

During the restaurant shutdown Take Out CLT received over 53,000 pageviews with roughly 10,400 unique users without any paid advertisement or SEO. Word of mouth and some social media partnerships helped to spread the word about the site via reddit, facebook, twitter, and instagram.

One of the most unique aspects of the website was that it was completely crowdsourced and thrived on the viral nature of presenting the people of Charlotte with something of value and letting individuals share as needed if they received value from the site. Over 450 contact forms were submitted and the grand total of 555 unique restaurant locations sorted by cuisine, neighborhood, and via an interactive map utilizing Openstreetmap.

After the state of emergency had largely ended and locations began opening up again the site was shut down to save on hosting costs. The wordpress theme remains opensourced and available on github.

Homepage

The homepage featured links to submit a restaurant and browse all currently submitted restaurants in the hero section. Below was a iframe of the map with a link to the full page and then a random select of 5 restaurants.

Cuisines

Each restaurant was given a cuisine designation via their website/google maps/yelp info and you could browse by a list of cuisines and then a list of each with a brief summary of the location/restaurant

Neighborhoods

Similar to cuisines each restaurant was given a named neighborhood to allow for easier filtering and browsing based off of the user’s location. Restaurants with multiple locations were given entries for each to ensure the relevant phone number for that specific location was included. Some local chains had closed a couple locations to focus on keeping one up and running so it was important to ensure accurate data for which places were active.

Single Restaurant Page

Each location / restaurant has an individual page with relevant details pulled from social media posts, websites, and mapping/aggregation services. The “Offering” options were based on what that location had set up and was able to be updated by users sending in new links with updates to the data. Direct links to the webpage, facebook, instagram, and/or twitter were right below the details section. Finally a static google map listing of the restaurant location was available for each of getting driving directions, etc.