A trilingual home for a private chef — WordPress treated like a real codebase

The client

Serpil Rantanen is a private chef in Finland — elegant chef work shaped by warm hospitality, clean technique, and recipes that travel across languages. Her audience is genuinely trilingual: English-speaking clients, the Finnish home market that searches for a yksityiskokki, and a Turkish-speaking community that knows her food from its roots.

The brief

A personal site that feels like her plating — calm, precise, nothing off the shelf — and that works as hard in Finnish and Turkish as it does in English. Dinners should be easy to inquire about, recipes should be first-class content rather than blog decoration, and she should be able to edit everything herself.

What we built

A custom theme, not a page-builder pile. The "Serpil Chef" theme is hand-built and lives in git — typography-led design, a hero that switches between video and stills, and templates tuned to exactly two jobs: presenting dinners and presenting recipes.

Three languages as equals. Polylang drives full EN/FI/TR versions with a properly localized theme (gettext throughout, compiled translations shipped with the code) — the Finnish site reads Finnish, not translated-English.

Recipes that Google understands. WP Recipe Maker integration means every recipe carries schema.org Recipe structured data — ingredients, steps, timing — eligible for rich results instead of rendering as plain text.

WordPress run like software. The whole stack is Dockerized behind Nginx with scripted deploys to a VPS: the theme is version-controlled and code-reviewed while Serpil edits content freely in WP admin. The usual WordPress failure mode — a live site nobody can reproduce — is designed out.

The result

One codebase, three languages, and a clear division of labor: content belongs to the chef, code belongs to git. Seasonal tables, dinners, and recipes are presented the way they deserve — and the infrastructure underneath behaves like every other project we ship.

Built by Ventus, a software agency in Cologne — see our custom software development services.