- Client
- Sports Illustrated
- Role
- Lead Designer & Developer
- Timeline
- 5 months
- Year
- 2025
- Category
- WordPress Website
Overview
Sports Illustrated Eats / SI Clubhouse is a custom WordPress theme (`sports-illustrated` 1.4.6) for restaurant hospitality: menus, reservations, catering, gallery, gift cards, franchise, careers, news. Theme URI: sportsillustratedeats.com.
Why
SI’s restaurant program needed a site that matched brand standards and let a hospitality team run menus, reservations, franchise interest, and news without an engineering ticket. Sports Illustrated Eats / SI Clubhouse is that property — hospitality IA, not a magazine dump.
Relevant to any brand extending into restaurants: the CMS has to be staff-operable (brunch, drinks, happy hour) while the templates stay on-brand.
The challenge
SI’s restaurant program needed a site that matched brand standards and let a hospitality team run menus, reservations, franchise interest, and news without an engineering ticket.
What made it hard
- Hospitality staff needed to edit menus without a developer.
- SI brand standards had to hold across Clubhouse + Eats.
- Franchise interest, reservations, and news had to live in one CMS.
Approach
Custom theme with Appearance → Menu Manager (Full/Drink/Brunch/Happy Hour), reservation and franchise templates, and performance-minded assets. Duplicate trees exist under SIC and SportsIllustrated; the live site is the WordPress property.
Process
- Theme: SI-branded templates for hospitality, not a blog skin.
- Menu Manager: Staff-editable brunch/drink/happy hour without PHP.
- Growth surfaces: Franchise, catering, gift cards, careers, news.
What we built
- Custom SI theme: Front page, menus, reservations, catering, gallery — hospitality IA, not a magazine dump.
- Menu Manager: WP admin for Full/Drink/Brunch/Happy Hour resets and edits.
- Franchise + intake: Franchise and contact flows for a branded restaurant program.
- Club news: News / club-news templates for property updates.
How it was built
Custom WordPress theme `sports-illustrated` with versions seen in archive from 1.1.0 through 1.4.6. Appearance → Menu Manager for Full / Drink / Brunch / Happy Hour. Templates for reservations, catering, gallery, gift cards, franchise, careers, news / club-news.
Contact Form 7 for intake. Performance-minded assets. Duplicate trees exist under SIC and SportsIllustrated; the live site is the WordPress property at sportsillustratedeats.com. Prefer “custom WP theme for SI Clubhouse/Eats” — we do not claim franchise count or reservation volume.
Stack
- WordPress: Custom theme 1.4.6
- Menu Manager: Staff-editable meal periods
- Contact Form 7: Intake in the WP stack
Outcomes
- WP 1.4.6: Custom theme version
- Menus: Staff-managed meal periods
- Franchise: Intake in the same CMS
- Live: sportsillustratedeats.com
Wins
- Custom SI theme (archive 1.1.0–1.4.6) for hospitality, not a blog skin.
- Staff-editable Menu Manager for meal periods.
- Franchise, catering, gift cards, careers, and news in one CMS.
- Live at sportsillustratedeats.com.
Hard parts
- Staff vs developers: Menus change daily. PHP was not an acceptable edit path.
- Brand standards: Clubhouse + Eats had to hold SI identity across templates.
- Growth surfaces: Franchise interest, reservations, and news had to live in the same CMS as the menu.
Services
- Custom WordPress Theme
- Restaurant Menu & Reservations UX
- Franchise Intake Flows
- Performance Optimization
- Order.store Integration