- Assaf Cohen
- Jan 14
- 5 min read
Summer break for my 14-year-old son, Kfir, started just like every other year: Minecraft, YouTube, eat, sleep, repeat.
This year, we both knew he needed something else. Maybe something that would get him off the couch and out in the world a bit.
That’s when we saw an ad in a neighborhood facebook group. It was for a program where teens could learn how to make a good cup of coffee and open their own café. Kfir was into it, so we signed him up. What followed wasn’t just a lesson in starting a business, but in creating a website that could bring in real money.
Create a restaurant website with Wix for free.
The birth of The Little Barista
The “café” was called "The Little Barista." It ran a couple of days a week during the summer out of a local community center. The kids learned everything from making the menu (which changed daily) to dealing with customers, and even creating cool latte art.
The website wasn’t part of the deal, but Kfir excitedly pitched the idea to his team. After all, his dad worked at Wix. In one night, he created a simple site on Wix himself, printed the URL on their menu and eagerly launched the site...only to watch it fail.
From a website that no one visited to 6x more sales
After the first week, Kfir came to me frustrated. He checked his Wix Analytics and saw that nobody was looking at the site. He was convinced that the whole website was useless.
So, I asked him to pull up the site and see if we could improve it together. We spent the next two hours looking through it and making some essential changes.
Those changes included:
Expanding the website from just a simple homepage with a menu, to a website that offered online ordering with in-person pickup, plus table reservation. This also entailed adding Wix Restaurants to my son’s site, which came with all the necessary functionality and web pages.
Improving the SEO, which included tweaking the meta tags and content. We wanted the website to come up in searches for “The Little Barista” and, with a little luck, for local searches like "cafés in [neighborhood name]." (For context, my specialty is in SEO.)
Making simple effective. To be clear, the website was, and still is, very minimal. We didn’t want to overcomplicate it. We just wanted it to help promote the café and make the team’s lives a little bit easier. With that in mind, the website needed to be simple to navigate and easy for the kids to manage on the backend—especially since the menu changed daily. Using Wix, we were able to achieve that.
Now, I have to give Kfir all the credit. He made all the changes himself, while I gave him tips here and there.
The end result was better than we could’ve predicted: after updating The Little Barista website, the café earned six times more money than the previous week, and Kfir had something to be very proud of.
Read more about how to make a website or check out the ideal website launch checklist.
What actually worked? The changes that mattered
This quick experiment taught us that the most effective changes don’t have to be fancy. These simple fixes made all the difference for The Little Barista.
Online ordering
When we first talked about adding online ordering to the site, Kfir smartly asked why it was necessary, if the team only accepted in-person payments. But as we talked through it—and later saw—online ordering allowed customers to conveniently place orders, whether they were sitting at the café or in their cars driving there.
Customers didn’t have to leave their chairs, and the servers and cashiers could spend their time doing other things. The kids were already juggling a ton during their shifts (serving, cleaning, making coffee) so this helped them operate more efficiently.
QR codes
The website allowed Kfir and his team to replace printed menus with QR codes that they could slap on each table.
This was a game changer: their menu changed all the time, depending on which pastries and ingredients were available for purchase each day, so printing menus was a pain.
People could now scan the QR codes, see the day’s menu, order, then simply wait for their drinks or pastries to be served to them at their tables. For anyone who needed help (like some of the older customers, families with little children or customers with special needs), the kids still came around in person. Simple.
Word-of-mouth marketing
Another benefit of having a website was how easy it became to share. People could easily send the website link to their friends via WhatsApp, Facebook and other community apps.
When the café first opened, the team had just sent around a photo with the message, “We opened a café—come!” Most of their first visitors were family and a few friends. But once the website was live, people could check out the menu ahead of time and even see what else was happening at the center (like kids’ movies and craft stands, which the team made sure to promote). Soon, people who’d never heard of the place started showing up, and bringing their friends with them.
Customers even told us that they came because they realized this wasn’t just “a cafeteria in a community center,” but a café run by teenagers. A place they could support, spend the morning and enjoy with their family. They also loved being able to reserve a seat and order ahead, directly from the website.
A lesson in business that we’ll both remember
For Kfir and me, this was a summer we’ll never forget.
As a father, I’m incredibly proud of the initiative Kfir took. If he hadn’t bothered to build a site in the first place, the café wouldn’t have been the success that it was.
I was also reminded that while figuring things out as an entrepreneur is exciting, getting advice from someone who’s been there or specializes in something can save a lot of headaches. Once Kfir saw the difference a few small changes could make to his website, he was thrilled—and so was I.
And for anyone running a business (kid, adult, doesn’t matter): the best websites aren’t just pretty, but actually help solve a problem. The Little Barista website made it easy for people to see what was on offer and order quickly, and the café got busy because of it.
Oh, and while this was just a summer thing, the site’s still online as a reminder of what a handful of teenagers can pull off. Kfir, meanwhile, is happily back on his favorite couch, enjoying his profits and playing his video games.
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