Roses by the Stairs
Helping a local business hit 100% (without the price tag)
The Backstory
Roses By The Stairs is an independent craft brewery in Phoenix, dreamed up by a local couple with a simple goal: create a welcoming space with great beer, great vibes, and tons of music references. After a few years of planning, Allie and Jordan opened their doors in 2022 - and it didn’t take long for people to notice them. Roses’s has grown a steady, loyal following and even started picking up awards along the way!
Allie, one of the owners of Roses, built the website herself with some short term initial support from a designer, and honestly they did damn fine work. People were finding the business just fine and the site was letting people learn what’s on tap, what day trivia was, and what the brewery’s hours were. But there was a limit on what the current set up could do.
For starters, the site was set up to look the best on bigger screens, which is not great when you want people to be able to pull up your bar menu on a phone ahead of getting to the front of the line on a busy Saturday! There was also some optimization to do to provide a streamlined and uniform way to keep event data current on the site - giving people a place outside of instagram to find out about events that Roses is hosting.
Our goal here was twofold: make the site legible for all screen sizes and give Roses an easier way to showcase tap room happenings. .
The Process
Setting Priorities
When I started working with Allie, she made it clear that budget needed to be part of the conversation from day one (as well it should be). So we worked smart! We prioritized what mattered most for a first pass and put the rest on a relaxed timeline that worked for the team at Roses.
The biggest thing to fix was the usability issues of their online menu. The Roses website is built in Webflow, a newer site builder with dual developer and designer views which is really cool but also demands shifting the mindset used when building out the site. Webflow’s structure in how it tries to help with visibility was actually at the root of the usability issues I found while auditing the site. After figuring out what was going wrong, rolling out the fixes for the layout made a lot of sense and I quickly had a version of the website ready for Allie to sign off on that prioritized mobile users. No more cut-off menus or mystery tap lists!
By relying on WebFlow’s collections, we were able to make a layout that would update content through a form instead of needing manual updates. Now it’s really clear what’s going on at the brewery every week!
Phased Follow Ups
A few months later, we tackled the second big update: cleaning up and organizing Roses’ event and food truck listings.
I templatized the structure and created focused groupings for a better user experience and improved discoverability:
Weekly recurring events (like trivia nights or run clubs)
One-off specials (like pop-ups or collabs)
Rotating food truck menus
Now, everything has a home on their website - no need to scroll Instagram stories to figure out what’s happening next Friday. Not only is it more convenient for customers, but it is easier to update and helps tell the story of what Roses is building through its brews: community.
Some snapshots of what the improved mobile version of the Roses website looks like after we cleaned it up!
The Outcome
I executed on the plan that Allie and I laid out at the beginning of our time, and in a few weeks, the site had leveled up. We hadn't made any sweeping changes to the simple, effective layout Allie had in place already - we simply made it operate more smoothly.
Now, Roses By The Stairs has:
A fully mobile-friendly website
Clear, accessible event listings and food truck info that’s easy to update
A site that supports their growing business and community vision
It’s still very much their site, just leveled up a bit. Sometimes, clients don't realize how far they've gotten on their own. In these cases, I just want to help them get through the final steps that will help them unlock the full potential of their vision in a timely manner.