What's this about?
Local 417 Eats is a community project of The Pages Media designed to help promote local restaurants in the Springfield, MO area. The goal of this project is to make it simple for patrons to identify and support local restaurants. This list excludes chains, franchises, and other larger restaurant brands that may have more supports than our local eateries. The goal here is to support our neighbors and friends and link people to the best the 417 area has to offer.
Why Local Restaurants?
COVID-19 has changed our world and at the very least highlighted the need to support our neighbors. Other large establishments may have other resources at their disposal in tough times but our friends and neighbors who are struggling to keep their business afloat need our help.
Local 417 Eats was started after seeing lots of great community efforts like the Springfield Missouri Convention and Visitors Buruea's local lists or Kim Mossberger's exhaustive curated list of eateries still operating in this time of crisis. Another great resource originated from a very popular and helpful Facebook group is the Welcome to Springfield, MO website. It lists both restaurants and other locally owned businesses. For a map-based website that hosts tons of other resources, check out the Community Resources Map for Springfield, MO website.
Supporting local has always been important, but this crisis has taught us how critical it is. Local restaurant owners banded together to help address community needs directly and fought to stay open to provide essential services in the midst of stay-at-home orders. While larger companies may have stepped out, our friends and neighbors stepped up. We're proud of the people in our area and we need to do what we can to ensure they're supported through this as well.
Who Put This Together?
Taylor and Kendra Page, a local Springfield area couple who freelance in web development and design and other online solutions for small businesses and churches. We wanted to find some way to give back and make it easy for people to support local.
How Long Will This Be Free and How Can We Support This Project?
Local 417 Eats will continue to be free, without ads, and actively supported for as long as this state of emergency is our reality. We hope one day it can grow and possibly turn into more, but for now it will continue to be available as a resource for local patrons to easily find the best local places in our area.
You can support us by supporting our local restaurants! Submit updated info if you find something wrong. It's hard to keep track of over 200 eating establishments and we certainly cannot do it on our own.
But What About Costs?
The only significant cost investment at this time, is our time. Local 417 Eats is a website that is built on the JAMStack, something we specialize in. This creates fast, efficient, and secure websites that have minimal hosting costs. Aside from paying for the domain, this website costs $0/month to run until we run into some really significant web traffic. And even when we do, scaling happens automatically so you should never see a crashed server page as a user. That's the power of the JAMStack.
No Seriously, How Can We Help You?
Seriously, we love supporting local businesses and we're doing fine in all this. You can support us by supporting our local businesses. If this is one small way we can help right now, we're here for it. Maybe consider buying a gift card if a local business has this option or choose to "pay it forward" to a family in need. You can also refer us to your friends and family who have website and online needs.
If you really feel the need to, you can always buy us a cup of coffee.