How we built a 24/7 travel center's website and hiring portal

A busy travel center never closes. Trucks roll in at 3 a.m., families stop for lunch, and the kitchen, fuel desk and store all need staff around the clock. Our client — a large highway travel center with fuel lanes, truck parking, a convenience store and several on-site restaurants — needed its online presence to keep up with that pace.

This post walks through what we built, why we built it that way, and how it's helping the business day to day. We're keeping the client's name private, but everything below is live and in use.

The challenge

Before the project, the business had the same problems we see at a lot of growing small businesses:

• No real home online. Travelers searching for fuel, food or parking nearby had little to go on.
• Menus that went out of date. Restaurant prices and items change, and static menu images were always a step behind.
• Hiring on paper and phone calls. With a large hourly team across fuel, food service, retail and facilities, applications were hard to track and easy to lose.
• No one place to manage it all. Every update meant waiting on someone technical.

What we built

1. A fast, mobile-first website

Most visitors arrive on a phone, often from the road. We built a clean, quick-loading site that answers the questions drivers actually have: what's here, is it open, and how do I get there.

• Clear pages for services and amenities — fuel, parking, showers, lounge, food and store
• Live Open now status with today's hours on the home page
• One-tap Call and Get directions buttons
• Built for search, so the business shows up when travelers look for a stop nearby

2. Restaurant pages that never go stale

The center runs multiple restaurant brands under one roof. Instead of uploading menu photos that age the moment prices change, each restaurant page opens the brand's own current menu directly. When a brand updates its menu, the website is already up to date — nobody has to remember to change anything.

3. A careers page built for hourly hiring

Hiring is constant at a 24/7 operation, so we made applying easy and made every application useful to the manager reading it.

• Open positions that applicants can filter by department, full-time or part-time, shift and experience
• A structured application that captures what hourly hiring needs: preferred shift, availability, start date, experience and work authorization
• A respectful reference section that tells applicants their current employer won't be contacted without their permission
• A clear fallback when nothing is posted online: come in and apply in person

4. An admin portal the team runs themselves

Behind the website sits a secure, login-only portal for the hiring team. No spreadsheets, no shared inboxes:

• Job requisitions — create, pause and close openings, which update the public careers page instantly
• Candidate pipeline — move applicants from new to screening, interview, offer and hired
• Duplicate check — spots repeat applications from the same person so they are handled once
• Activity log — a record of who changed what, and when
• Reports and settings — a quick view of hiring activity, managed without a developer

The goal was simple: the business should be able to run its own website and hiring, without calling us for every change.

How it helps day to day

• Every application lands in one place, with the same information every time — nothing sits in a paper pile or a forgotten inbox.
• Managers post and close jobs in minutes, and the public site reflects it right away.
• Menus and hours stay accurate without anyone having to update them by hand.
• Travelers find what they need fast — services, food, hours and directions, all from their phone.
• Low running costs — modern hosting keeps the site fast and secure without an expensive server to maintain.

Under the hood

For the technically curious: the public site is a lightweight, mobile-first web build on modern cloud hosting, and the hiring portal runs on a cloud database with secure sign-in and row-level security, so applicant data is only visible to authorized staff. It's the same approach we use for our own website and admin tools.

Could your business use something similar?

If you run a hospitality, retail or service business and you're still hiring off paper, updating menus by hand, or waiting on someone to change your website, we can help. We design, build and maintain websites and internal tools for small and mid-sized businesses across St. Louis and beyond.

See our Web Solutions or start with an AI Ops Audit to find where your team is losing time — or simply tell us what you're working on.