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The studio
FrontCanvas is a small studio in Michigan. We redesign the websites of restaurants whose food is far better than their front door — and we do the design before we ask you for anything.
Most of the restaurants we approach are not struggling. The room is busy, the reviews are good, and the kitchen knows exactly what it is doing. The website is the one part of the business nobody has had a free Tuesday to fix.
That gap is unfair, and it is expensive in a way that never shows up on a P&L. A cramped menu PDF, a phone number that will not tap, a photo of a dining room from two renovations ago — none of it changes how the food tastes, and all of it changes how many people decide to come.
So we stopped writing proposals. We pick a restaurant, study it properly, and build a complete concept for a new site at our own cost. Then we send it. There is no call to schedule and no invoice attached. You have already seen the finished thing before the question of money comes up, which means the decision is about the work rather than about trusting a stranger.
That is the whole idea, and every other thing about how this studio runs follows from it.
How the studio works
The order of these four steps is the entire difference between us and every other web shop that has emailed you.
We look for places where the cooking clearly outruns the website — strong reviews, a full room on a Friday, and a homepage that has not been touched since it was built.
We read your menu, look at your photos, and design a full concept for a new site. This happens before we have spoken to you, and it costs you nothing whether you reply or not.
One email with a private link. You open it on your phone between services and see exactly what your restaurant could look like. No call to book, no deck to sit through.
If it is not for you, delete the email. If it is, we make it real and put it on your own domain, usually inside two weeks.
What we believe
A guest meets you on a phone screen long before they meet your host stand. If that screen is slow, cramped, or three years out of date, some of them quietly pick somewhere else. They never tell you, and you never see the reservation that did not happen.
Anyone can promise a beautiful site over a phone call. We would rather build the thing and let you look at it. You decide with the finished design in front of you, not a description of one.
You should not have to learn a dashboard to change a price. You should not have to open a support ticket to add a special. Send us the change the way you would text a friend, and it gets done.
You will never get a document from us about headless architecture or conversion funnels. We talk about how the menu reads, how fast it opens on a five-year-old phone, and whether someone can find your hours in under three seconds.
What we refuse to do
A studio that emails restaurants out of the blue has to be careful about how it behaves. These are the lines we hold.
One concept, one short reminder, and then we stop. Every email we send has a working unsubscribe link, and using it removes you permanently.
The concepts we send are unsolicited, so they never appear in our portfolio, in search results, or anywhere else public. Each one lives at a random, unlisted address sent only to that restaurant, and it comes down on request. We ask before naming anyone as a client.
No borrowed logos, no invented testimonials, no rounded-up client count. This studio is early, and pretending otherwise would be the first thing we lied to you about.
The domain stays in your name. When the work is paid for, the site is yours — we will hand it to any developer you like, without a conversation about it.
Dentists, gyms, and law firms all need websites. They are not what we are good at. Doing one thing for one industry is the only reason we can move this fast.
Where things stand
FrontCanvas is at the beginning. There is no wall of client logos on this site because there is not yet a wall of client logos, and putting one up would be the easiest lie in this industry to tell.
What that means for you is practical: we are taking a small number of restaurants at a time, the person who designs your site is the person who answers your email, and nothing gets handed off to an account manager who has never read your menu.
When there is something real to show, it will appear here. Until then, this space stays empty on purpose.
We started in Michigan because it is where we eat, and because a town with this much good food should not have this many bad restaurant websites. We work outward across southeast Michigan, and remotely elsewhere.
We reply within one business day.
Tell us where to eat and we will build you a concept. You will see it before any money is discussed.
Nothing is charged until you have seen the design.