Project
Rocketboy Pizza
A five-store Sydney pizza chain, from its 2014 rebrand through nine years of trading
Rocketboy Pizza was a home-style pizza chain across Sydney's east and inner west. It began as a rebrand: four of the people behind Doughboy Pizza, which had been trading since 1999, took five of their stores and started again under a new name on 1 April 2014. Every page of the site was designed by The National Grid. I built it, and kept working on it for years afterwards.
The site is shown here as it ran in 2022, with the homepage banner restored from the site’s own archived artwork. Rocketboy moved their online ordering into their point of sale platform in January 2023, and the website moved with it, so the current site at that address is not this work.
Project Scope
- Build to The National Grid's design
- Store finder and delivery area check
- Menu the team could maintain
- Jobs, franchising and catering enquiries
- Custom WordPress theme
- Nine years of ongoing maintenance
The challenge
Somebody landing on a pizza website is hungry and in a hurry. They want to know three things: what can I get, will you bring it to my house, and if not, where is the nearest shop. Every one of those answers changes depending on which of the five stores they are closest to, and the stores did not keep the same hours as each other.
On top of that, the business was starting again under a name nobody had heard of. Regulars who had been ordering from Doughboy for fifteen years needed to understand what had happened and why, and the site had to carry that without turning the homepage into an essay.
What I built
A custom WordPress build following the design exactly, with the moving parts put where the staff could reach them. The things that changed week to week, the menu, the store hours, the jobs listings, were all edited by the team.
Type in your postcode
The store finder takes a postcode and answers the real question. If Rocketboy delivered there it named the nearest store and offered to call it or start an order. If they did not, it said so plainly and pointed at the stores you could pick up from, rather than leaving a hungry visitor at a dead end.
A menu that stayed current
Pizzas grouped by category, each with its own photograph, a choice of three bases and four sizes, priced individually. There was a printable version to download and a separate page for allergies. All of it edited by the team, which is why it was still accurate years later.
The reason for the new name
A page that told the story straight: fifteen years as Doughboy, four of the owners deciding to build something different, and what changed about the food. It gave loyal customers an answer and gave the new brand a reason to exist beyond a new sign above the door.
The other people who come looking
A pizza business gets more than hungry customers. Job applicants, people wanting a franchise, and offices booking catering all arrived through the same site, so each got its own enquiry path instead of being funnelled into one general contact form.
Across the site
Locations: postcode search, then every store in full
The story, on a phone
The result
The site went live with the brand on 1 April 2014 and was still running nine years later. Over that time the menu changed many times and the design held up without a rebuild. That is the part I am proudest of. It kept working while the business changed around it.
In January 2023 Rocketboy moved their online ordering into their point of sale platform, and the website went with it. For a business where nearly every order starts on a phone, putting the ordering and the till on one system is a sensible thing to do.
If you run a business with more than one location and a website that cannot tell someone which one is theirs, that is a solvable problem. Take a look at the Suncoast Express quote and booking system, see how a Rapid Site works for a smaller build, or get in touch.
Common questions about this project
Close to nine years. It launched with the brand on 1 April 2014 and ran until January 2023, when Rocketboy moved their online ordering into their point of sale platform and the website went with it.
Yes, and it is a different job from a single site. Every location needs its own address, trading hours, phone number and ordering link, all of it editable by the people who actually know when a store changes its hours. Rocketboy had five stores across Sydney, and the site was built so a new one could be added without a developer.
They get a straight answer and somewhere to go: the site says Rocketboy does not deliver to that area yet, and points them at the store list so they can pick up instead. A dead end is the one result a hungry visitor will not forgive.
Often, and this was one of them. The National Grid designed the Rocketboy website, every page of it, and I built it. The job is to make the finished website match the design, including all the parts a drawing cannot show, like what happens when someone types in a postcode you do not deliver to.
Yes, and it is a much shorter job than it was then. Store finders, menus and delivery-area checks are all well established now. What has not changed is that the useful version of this is built around how the business actually runs, not around a template that happens to have a locations page.
