Small Business Activation
The places where communities gather outside of home and work — what sociologists call third places — are disappearing. Remote work, rising costs, and urban migration have thinned the social fabric of small towns across the country. The businesses and organizations that remain as genuine community anchors rarely have the resources to tell their story well online. The result is a gap between the real value these places hold for their communities and their visibility to the people who would love them.
This project addresses that gap directly.
The Tower is a bar and lounge in Brattleboro, Vermont — a small, beloved space run by Kate Barry that serves as a genuine gathering point for the community. It hosts events, brings people together, and reflects the particular warmth and character of the town it lives in. What it lacked was a digital presence that could communicate any of that to someone who hadn't already walked through the door.
This case study documents the end-to-end design and development of a bespoke branding and web package for The Tower — and the broader model behind it. The project spans brand strategy, audience research, full-stack web development, video production, and content operations design. It was built as the first instantiation of Lexiloo Designs — a repeatable service model for delivering professional brand identity and digital presence to small businesses and community-based organizations that cannot otherwise access it.
The Problem It Solves
Small businesses and community organizations that function as third places face a specific and underserved challenge. They are not large enough to hire agencies. They are too complex in their identity and community relationships to be well-served by generic drag-and-drop platforms. Squarespace gives you a website. It does not give you a brand. It does not give you a digital presence that feels like the place itself.
The problem breaks into three layers.
The isolation problem. Third places are in decline nationally. The businesses and organizations that remain — bars, community centers, local nonprofits, after-school programs — are doing culturally important work with limited visibility. Their reach is bounded by whoever already knows them.
The resource problem. Unlike large businesses, small community-anchored organizations cannot access professional design and development services at a price point that makes sense for their scale. The tools available to them — Squarespace, Wix, Canva — are generic by design. They can produce a website. They cannot produce a brand identity that authentically represents a specific community and the people who belong to it.
The maintainability problem. Even when a small business gets a professional site built, they often cannot update it themselves. They become dependent on whoever built it. The brand stagnates. The site becomes out of date. The investment degrades.
Lexiloo Designs was built to solve all three. The Tower was the first client.
The Audience
Two distinct audiences shaped the design decisions throughout this project.
Community leader clients — the small business owners, nonprofit managers, and community organizers who are potential Lexiloo clients. Research into this population surfaced a consistent profile: highly community-oriented, resource-constrained, deeply invested in authentic representation of their work, and frustrated by the gap between what they can afford and what they know they need. They value independence — they want tools they can manage themselves. They value trust — they want to work with someone who genuinely understands their context. They are not looking for a vendor. They are looking for a collaborator.
Tower community members — the actual patrons of The Tower whose needs shaped the site's design and the bar's positioning. Three personas emerged from research that captured the range of this audience:
Isabelle — a 24-year-old barista and part-time student who moved to Brattleboro after high school and built her social world here. She is looking for a nightlife option that feels safe, fun, and genuinely connected to the town's character. She travels outside Brattleboro on weekends when local options don't meet her needs.
Liam — a tech entrepreneur who relocated from New York City during the pandemic and is trying to put down roots in Vermont. He misses the energy and sophistication of urban social life and is looking for a space that bridges that with small-town warmth. He researches venues online before visiting — the website and its tone matter to him before he ever walks in the door.
Lydia — a 56-year-old Spanish teacher and jewelry maker who has lived in Vermont for over 30 years. She does not drink alcohol and is looking for social spaces where drinking is not the point. She wants good energy, interesting events, and the possibility of meeting new people and growing her jewelry clientele.
These three personas share nothing obvious on the surface. What they share underneath is a desire for a space that feels real — that has a distinct identity, a genuine community, and a reason to exist beyond serving drinks. That became the brief for The Tower's brand.
The Approach
Brand Strategy Before Design
The project began not with visual design but with a strategic question: what does The Tower actually mean to the people who love it, and how do you communicate that to someone who has never been?
This required direct collaboration with the client throughout the process — not a single intake conversation but an ongoing dialogue about community, identity, story, and values. The brand that emerged from that process is specific to this place and these people. It cannot be replicated by a template.
Mobile-First Design
All wireframes and design decisions were developed mobile-first. The Tower's audience is discovering it on their phones — through social media, through search, through a friend's text. A site that works beautifully on desktop but requires pinching and scrolling on mobile is not a site that serves this community.
CMS for Client Autonomy
A central design requirement was that the client could update the site independently after delivery. This shaped the entire technical architecture. The bar's event calendar changes. Menus evolve. The community's story keeps developing. A site that requires a developer every time something changes is not a site that serves a small business owner with a full plate.
The solution was a lightweight CMS layer built directly into the site — a logged-in editing view that allows Kate to update content, upload images, and manage event information without touching code. The non-logged-in view is a clean, fully designed public-facing site. The logged-in view reveals edit components layered over the same interface.
Video as Brand Expression
A 5–7 minute promotional video was produced as a core deliverable — not an add-on. For a place whose value is almost entirely experiential, static web design can only do so much. Video brings the space to life. It communicates atmosphere, personality, and community in ways that copy and photography cannot.
The video was shot on-location in Brattleboro and at The Tower, using iPhone 13 with external audio capture, and edited in Adobe Premiere and After Effects.
The Build
Technical Architecture
The site runs on a clear separation between a static front end and a lightweight dynamic back end:
Front end — GitHub Pages HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files served statically. GitHub Pages provides free, reliable hosting with custom domain support and HTTPS — a meaningful consideration for a small business client managing costs.
Back end — Node.js on DigitalOcean A Node.js / Express server handles content update requests from the logged-in client view. DigitalOcean was selected for its simplicity, affordability, and scalability at the project's size. The backend processes requests from the CMS layer and writes updated content to the database.
Database — SQLite A self-contained, lightweight database embedded directly in the application. No separate database server to configure or maintain. SQLite stores the dynamic content — event listings, menu updates, images — that the client edits through the CMS layer.
Development environment — VSCode All front-end and back-end code written in Visual Studio Code, leveraging JavaScript across both layers to minimize context switching and simplify the development workflow.
Key Design Decisions
Edit mode / view mode separation. The client-facing CMS is not a separate admin portal — it is the same interface the public sees, with edit components revealed on login. This design choice ensures that what the client edits is exactly what visitors see, eliminating the disorientation of a back-end dashboard that looks nothing like the live site.
No-code content editing. The client does not write code to update her site. She clicks, edits, uploads, and saves. The technical complexity is entirely abstracted. The client experience is point-and-click throughout.
Design manual as a standalone deliverable. A comprehensive design manual — including style tiles, typography, color system, photography guidelines, and social media templates — was produced alongside the site. This ensures the brand remains consistent as Kate creates new content independently after delivery. The manual is the artifact that makes the investment durable.
Supporting Infrastructure
The project was tracked end-to-end in Notion — a full project database with timeline views, milestone tracking, and deadline notifications. This served dual purposes: keeping the project on schedule and modeling a workflow that can be replicated for future Lexiloo clients.
A competitive review of the existing market — Squarespace, WordPress, Google Sites — confirmed the gap the project is designed to fill. These platforms offer templates. They do not offer community-specific brand identity, bespoke design, client collaboration, or a design manual that extends the investment beyond the launch. The differentiation is not technical. It is the combination of professional design craft, genuine client partnership, and a handoff that leaves the client actually empowered.
What Success Looks Like
For The Tower
A fully live, mobile-optimized website that authentically represents the bar's identity and community
A client who can update content, post events, and manage her digital presence without external help
Measurable increases in foot traffic, event registrations, and social media engagement attributable to the new digital presence
A brand identity system coherent enough to extend as the business grows
For Lexiloo Designs
A documented, repeatable process from initial client consultation through site launch and design manual delivery
A codebase and design system modular enough to adapt for future clients without rebuilding from scratch
Evidence that a professional-grade branding and web package can be delivered affordably enough to serve small businesses and community organizations
Reflection
The Tower started as a web development project. It became something more precise: a question about what small community-anchored businesses actually need from a design partner, and whether that need can be served at a price point that makes sense for the people who need it most.
The answer this project proposes is yes — if the process is right. The technology is not the hard part. Squarespace can make a website. The hard part is understanding a community well enough to make a brand that actually belongs to it. That requires time, direct collaboration, a genuine curiosity about the people the business serves, and a willingness to let the client's story lead rather than a designer's aesthetic preferences.
What Lexiloo Designs is building — through The Tower and beyond — is a repeatable model for that kind of partnership. The code is replicable. The workflow is documented. The design manual travels with the client. But the thing that makes it work is the collaborative process that produces something specific enough to be true, and simple enough for a small business owner to maintain on her own.
That is what community-centered design actually means. Not a template. A tool that belongs to the person who will use it.
Alexa Barry · DGMD Capstone · Spring 2025 · Harvard Extension SchoolClient: Kate Barry, The Tower, Brattleboro VTLexiloo Designs — bespoke branding and digital experiences for small businesses and community-based organizations
