When someone searches your restaurant name on Google or Bing, will your restaurant website appear? If the answer is no, you are missing out on thousands of customers a year. Just like a menu, your restaurant website design is an extension of your restaurant’s brand on the most populated platform around, the internet.
Your competition is growing and having a well-constructed website can determine whether you sink or swim up to the top. Having an easy to use website gives potential customers the opportunity to get acquainted with your menu, style, interior, and services. It gives you the opportunity to collect online orders and take reservations easier which in turn grows your business. Check out our tips below on how to design the perfect restaurant website.
Audience
Before starting, design your website on paper. It’s important to think about who your website will be speaking to. You will want to find the high traffic areas, the general demographics of your city, and the price range of your menu items. For instance, if you are a quick service restaurant near a college or university, you probably want to attract students. For students, they enjoy an online ordering system and navigation that is quick so they can grab menu items on their way to class. Where a fine dining restaurant in a beach location would cater mostly to tourists and that demographic would most likely enjoy looking at restaurant landscape or tropical food pictures. Once your audience is defined, you can move on to the creation of the website.
Restaurant Website Design
A good color palette on a restaurant’s website helps balance out the colors in the photography of different food items. Most successful restaurants try to stick with brown, white, red, and black. This combination symbolizes reliability, freshness, mystery, and passion. Food photographs also look good against a black background. It’s important to do research and stay away from colors that make your website look potentially harmful.
Menu
Never upload your paper menu as your online menu. This will give mobile users problems panning and reading it properly. Your website design also affects your SEO ranking because search engines see the text as too small and they can’t crawl your website. Also, never separate parts of your menu into different tabs or pages. People will think it’s not very user-friendly if they must keep clicking back and forth if their meal comes with sides or they want to add an appetizer.
Mobile Website
Cellphones and mobile applications are essentials to life for most folks. People are on-the-go more and they expect modern conveniences to keep up. They want to have the capability to place their food orders directly from their mobile device. When you are building your website, ensure that the functionality is mobile friendly.
Contact Us Form
A smart restaurant website will have an easy-to-fill contact form. You don’t want your customers to experience any issues when it comes to contacting you, or they will bounce and go to one of your competitors. Don’t forget to also add a map to your contact us page so people can get directions easily. Having a map will remove any questions of your restaurant is located.
Reviews
A huge volume of people always like to do their research before visiting a restaurant for the first time. If customers are saying good things about you, why not share it as much as possible. Try pulling any reviews you have on Google+ or Yelp and integrate them with your website. Customer loyalty programs are a great way to boost your popularity with customers.
Don’t forget that growth in the restaurant business does not come easy, it takes constant work and improvement. Website design is becoming more critical as more users are going online to place their orders. Consider beefing up your online efforts and become the #1 online restaurant in your town.
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