Yard Club
A café, a bike workshop and an event yard off Mostafa Kamel in Maadi as-Sarayat. One place, three reasons to go, and a website that had never once said so.
Industry
Hospitality, cycling and events
Scope
Positioning, information architecture, design, build, EN/AR, accounts, bookings
Stack
Client-rendered SPA, hash routing, static hosting, WebP photography pipeline
Homepage — the week comes first, the café and workshop are doors off it
Where it started
A WordPress site for a bike shop.
One of us has been going to this place for years. It is a yard you end up in — rides down the corniche in the morning, trail mornings in Wadi Degla, long evenings that finish with a mocktail. The site it had, at bikeyardeg.com, was a stock WordPress theme that listed bike servicing. Accurate, and completely silent about why anyone goes.
So the first meeting was not about features. It was about what the place is, in order: a community, a yard, a café, a workshop. Once that order existed, the structure was almost decided for us.
The structure
Organised around the week, not the menu.
Events are the spine
The homepage answers one question — what is on this week — and every other route hangs off it. “See this week” is the only primary action.
Two doors, with their hours on them
Café 9am–1am, Bike Yard 11am–9pm, shown on the homepage cards. Half of all questions the yard used to get on the phone were opening hours.
Booking lives inside the workshop, not the nav
Maintenance reservations sit where someone is already reading about the workshop. A global “Book now” button would have been a shop’s instinct, not a yard’s.
Arabic as a first language, not a plugin
The EN/ع switch is in the header at full size. The crowd here reads both, often in the same sentence.
The call we argued about
“Put the menu on the homepage.” We said no, and we were right to.
Every café site in Cairo opens with the menu, so that is what was asked for. But the menu is what you look at once you are already sitting down. Nobody crosses Maadi to read a drinks list.
We moved the menu one level down, to its own route with its own opening hours, and gave the homepage to the week’s events. Pushing the menu down was the single decision that made the site stop looking like every other café in the city.
Build choices
The lightest thing that does the job.
What it needed
Photography that loads on a phone on mobile data, instant route changes, a real bilingual layer, and a login for members. A single-page app on static hosting does all of that for almost nothing a month.
What we left out
A content management system. Events change weekly and two people run the yard — an admin panel would have meant a training session, a password reset every three months and a monthly bill, to save typing. We update the week with them instead.
Outcome
Live at yardclub.net. The yard finally has a site that reads like the place — one address for the week, the café and the workshop, in both languages, replacing a theme that only ever described the bikes.
Next case study
Art of Nature