Web Design Services for Restaurants

Websites for restaurants must match the unique appeal of the restaurants they represent. Your site should make a website visitor feel the same as the diners at your restaurant. Our job is to match your vision. Visual design is the first order of business for this.

Simple, elegant, fun, quirky, or whatever atmosphere you wish to create inside your restaurant should also be created on your website.

If you are a casual restaurant, our goal is to telegraph “casual” to visitors.

If you are an exclusive high-end restaurant your site should put people in an elegant mood before they show up in person.

When your customers recommend you then your website should reinforce their recommendation.

We make sure it does.

A restaurant website does not need to be expensive, it just needs to tell the right story without being overdone. No one likes things overcooked!

Restaurant Website Requirements

While visual design and content of a website will vary as greatly as restaurants do, some elements that are absolutely essential. To ignore these can doom your site to providing bad service before your guests even arrive.

Mobile friendly responsive website

It is imperative that your restaurant website acknowledge our increasingly mobile world. Well over 50% of your visitors will using smartphones to look at your site and decide whether they will dine there. Don’t make them zoom in to see your expansive web site. Never use Flash or other technologies that are a problem on smartphones. Also, know that Google and Bing give better search results placement to websites that are mobile friendly when the search is made from a phone. Searches for restaurants from phones are extremely common.

Make your exact location clear

Along with registering you restaurants location with the big search engines in order to get onto their maps, your website should reinforce this location. And make it easy for the site visitor to find. Think about a traveler in a hotel doing a search for a nearby Thai restaurant. Google likes to connect mobile searches to map and directory listings for nearby searches. Make sure your site reinforces your location. (Don’t forget to register your site with Google, Bing and Yahoo so they can be sure of your location or locations.)

Make your phone number easy to find

This seems like a no-brainer, but a quick survey of restaurant websites shows otherwise. Usually design or “concept” are in the way. Put your phone number (and address) everywhere — especially on pages that list menu items a visitor may be looking at for a to-go order. Don’t make people change pages to make an order on the phone.

Establish and connect to your social media

Social media like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter can magnify your restaurant’s presence if you diligently establish two-way connections between social networks and your website. Make it easy for a happy eater to share their experience with their friends. When their friends comment, the impact ripples even further out. We are happy to help you develop your social network engagement. The importance of social media to restaurants cannot be over overstated.

Multi-unit Restaurant Websites

Multi-location or multi-concept restaurant companies need to evaluate the best way to organize their web visitor’s experience.

Combining dissimilar concepts into one site because of related ownership can be counterproductive. These combination sites can be confusing for visitors and diminish the way search engines perceive the context of website. Never use “gateway” home pages to direct visitors to different restaurants. Also, you generally want to brand the domain of the website with the name of the restaurant – this helps guarantee that the restaurant will display number one in searches for the restaurant name.

Multiple locations of the same restaurant concept are easier to organize. This is especially true if their menus are consistent from store to store. But making take-out orders clear can be problematic for visitors. It is imperative that your web visitors understand which store they are calling. This can be harder than it looks when you look at it from the visitor viewpoint.

Beyond Your Website

Your website should be your online hub, but you cannot ignore the value of social media, travel guide sites, local media, local search and review sites like Zagat and Yelp. You cannot control them, but you should embrace them. Be prepared to engage a few unhappy commenters, show everyone you care. If you have too many unhappy reviews and comments, you should take that as a sign that something is wrong somewhere in the store.

Your guests already are talking about you online.

Search engines will connect a lot of dots if you help them. Doing all this well can make it where your customers may actually find your restaurant without ever going to your site. On Google, they may get a map of your location and your ratings on Google+ at the top of their search results.

Encourage, embrace, and engage with them, just as you would do inside the walls of your establishment and website.

We also do print design and production. We can help you with menu design, table tents, and any other printed materials.