Belleville's Watering Hole & Diner

Belleville's is a beloved waterfront restaurant and lounge on Victoria's Inner Harbour, locally owned and operated since 2015. Serving as both a 19+ lounge and an all-ages diner, the venue offers breakfast through late-night dining with a sprawling patio overlooking the harbour. Motiv Creative Labs was engaged to completely redesign and rebuild the Belleville's website from the ground up — replacing an aging WordPress site with a 100% code-built, performance-driven web application purpose-built for the hospitality industry.

The previous website suffered from slow load times, poor mobile usability, and menus locked inside non-crawlable PDF files. Our mandate was clear: clean, confident, modern, and easy to use. We replaced every PDF menu with six fully text-based, SEO-crawlable menu pages rendered as semantic HTML — a major improvement for both search engines and customers browsing on their phones. A custom-built reservation system connected to a PostgreSQL database handles booking requests with instant email notifications and an authenticated admin dashboard for staff to manage reservations without any technical knowledge.

Built on Next.js 15 with React 19 and TypeScript, the site follows a feature-based frontend architecture with Domain-Driven Design principles on the backend. Multi-stage Docker builds keep the production image lean, while Traefik provides automatic HTTPS and certificate management. The result is a dramatically faster, mobile-first website that with streamlined reservations, crawlable menus, and a clean design that lets the venue speak for itself.