Ayıntap Case Study: How Faox Gave Gaziantep a Digital Voice
a whole city's memory, from zero
across 11 gastronomy categories
plus 400 page-specific share cards
brand, content and code included
A world-famous kitchen. No voice to tell it.
Gaziantep is Türkiye's first UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy and holds 109 geographical indications, more than any other city in the country. Yet online, its story lived in scattered travel listicles, repetitive blog posts and single-language fragments. The family behind Ayıntap came to Faox with a picture in their heads: their hometown, presented to the world properly.
There was no brand, no name, no site, no content. Faox took it on turnkey: name, brand, design, content, code and SEO, all from one team. One month later a cultural encyclopedia hundreds of pages deep was live, speaking to Türkiye and the world.
Build everything. Borrow nothing.
From an empty page to a city's digital voice.
A brand born from the city itself
Faox designed the identity from zero. The name is the city's ancient one, Ayıntap; the mark is Zeugma's world-famous Gypsy Girl mosaic; the palette comes from copper trays, pistachios and old stone; the typography pairs a classic serif and hand-written italic accents with a modern sans. One glance ties the brand to six millennia of history. The identity shipped as a full 29-page brand guideline: logo construction and variations, colour systems, typography and social layout rules.
Brand values, the colour palette, logo construction, the website and brand applications: the full Ayıntap brand presentation is on Behance.
View on BehanceAn encyclopedia architecture, not a blog
Hundreds of pages were organized into four pillars: gastronomy, culture, history and an interactive map, held together by one strict rule: nothing sits deeper than two clicks from the homepage. Every dish, museum and story has its own page, its own metadata and its own place in the hierarchy. Internal links follow the same discipline: every dish points to its category, its ingredients and its related stories, so authority flows through the whole site instead of pooling on a single page.
Every language gets the whole story
Turkish and English are not a main site and a translation: each language is a full mirror of the same encyclopedia, with matching internal links on both sides. A reader in any language gets the complete product, and that is how the site keeps growing: every new language arrives as a content task, not a rebuild.
Authority you can point at
Instead of adjectives, the content leans on anchors that can be verified: UNESCO's Creative City of Gastronomy listing and TÜRKPATENT geographical indication registrations appear as badges on the pages they belong to. The editorial tone follows the same discipline: context and history, not superlatives. Dish by dish, stop by stop, this builds real topical authority: every new page deepens the cluster around it instead of standing alone.
The brand, off the screen
Then the family asked for a T-shirt. Faox designed the back print as a city poster: GAZİANTEP in tall condensed letters, the city's coordinates, and a hand-written line, Tarihin, Lezzetin, Zanaatın Başkenti, the capital of history, flavour and craft. Beneath it, one collage gathers the city's landmarks and flavours: the castle, an old stone street, the Gypsy Girl and the mosaics of Zeugma, baklava and coffee on a copper tray. The site and the social handle sign it off at the bottom, so the design always points back to Ayıntap.
Dark, cinematic, and built to be explored.
A mosaic-tiled homepage, an interactive cultural map, category grids with live search and detail pages that treat a kebab with the same editorial care as a museum. Around them sit a culture atlas, a working blog and the family's own story: every corner researched, written and designed by Faox.
A foundation built to be found.
Underneath the design is a deliberately lean, performance-first build, and on top of it sits a complete search foundation, built page by page.
Every page declares its language twin through hreflang. Every page carries structured data that machines can read as fact. A site-level llms.txt hands AI assistants a verified summary in each of its languages, and 400 page-specific share cards make every shared link preview with its own photograph. Every time a new language joins, the mirrored architecture makes it an editorial project, not an engineering one.
The numbers agree. In Google PageSpeed Insights, the site scores a perfect 100 for performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO, and passes 3 of 3 agentic browsing checks: the new audit that measures whether AI agents can read a site. On a desktop connection, the homepage paints in under a second.
Eight weeks of regular posting. 424,000 views.
Regular posting began on 3 August, on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook at once, briefed from the brand guideline: reveal the hidden detail and keep it warm. Almost every post is drawn from the encyclopedia itself and published in English, written for people discovering Gaziantep from abroad. Eight weeks later the channels had passed 424,000 views.
View the weekly numbers
| Week of | Views | Running total |
|---|---|---|
| 3 Aug | 118 | 118 |
| 10 Aug | 700 | 818 |
| 17 Aug | 754 | 1,572 |
| 24 Aug | 39,462 | 41,034 |
| 31 Aug | 1,389 | 42,423 |
| 7 Sep | 2,428 | 44,851 |
| 14 Sep | 124,464 | 169,315 |
| 21 Sep | 152,592 | 321,907 |
Sources: TikTok Studio, Instagram and Facebook insights exports, 28 September 2026. All figures start on 3 August 2026, when regular posting began; the introductory posts from July are left out. TikTok figures are video views for the whole account. Instagram and Facebook figures are lifetime views of the same 23 posts on each platform.
Three posts from the feed: the rhythm of the Coppersmiths' Bazaar, a pistachio breakfast that needs no avocado, and a four-stop city guide, from Tahmis coffeehouse to the Zeugma Museum.
The website is the foundation. The rollout continues.
Ayıntap launched with its brand, website and search foundation complete, and its social channels passed 424,000 views in their first eight weeks of regular posting. Email and digital PR come next, and this page will add website and search results as the data matures.
Brand identity, designed from zero, with its 29-page guideline.
The encyclopedia site, with its full SEO and AI-search foundation.
Social channels, with 424,000+ views in eight weeks of regular posting.
A T-shirt design, delivered to the family and drawn from the same city story.
A content engine: every encyclopedia page is a post ready to happen.
New languages, arriving as content, not rebuilds.
Email programme built on the same content.
Digital PR for international reach.
Website and search results on this page, as the data matures.
“They took the picture in our heads and made it real: our hometown's flavours, culture and history, told properly to the whole world. Faox walked this road with us like a partner, not a supplier.”
Let's talk
Have a story the world hasn't heard yet?
Let's build its voice.
From a blank page to a living brand: we design, write, build and grow digital presences that are made to be found.