Grinders CMS
Grinders is a butcher shop. We built the owner a back office he runs from his phone: edit the meat case, set weekly specials, change hours, and publish to the live site in one tap.
How this one came together
Grinders Meat and Market is a butcher shop, and the owner wanted to run his own website without calling anyone. So we built him a private back office that lives behind the public site. From his phone he can edit the meat case, set prices, mark items on sale, post a weekly special, change store hours, flip the announcement bar, and rewrite the about page. Every change publishes to the live site the moment he saves.
The admin wears the shop's own clothes. The same butcher paper, the same Bitter and Source Sans type, the same saddle brown and Grinders red, so it feels like the back room of the store rather than a generic dashboard. It is built mobile first, with a simple row of tabs along the bottom, because the owner works on his feet. Signing in is a text message code or Face ID, with no passwords to forget, and only listed phone numbers can get in.
Under the hood it is a small, sturdy service: Node and SQLite running next to the site, rebuilding the public pages on every save. Each publish is snapshotted, so a bad edit is one tap from being undone. It ships through the same CI as the website, backs itself up nightly, and runs entirely on the shop's own server. The owner gets the control of a custom platform with the ease of a notes app.
The newest addition is a Stats screen: the shop's real traffic, live from Google Analytics, with the path from visit to call, to directions, to the order button, readable at a glance on the same phone. The owner checks it the way he checks the register. That is what we mean when we say systems instead of websites: the site brings customers in, the back office runs itself, and none of it rents space on somebody else's platform.