Restaurant website design best practices Restaurant owners spend thousands of dollars in setting up an outlet, licensing, buying equipments, designing interiors, pay commissions to POS and many more. But when it comes to creating a marketing channel for them by creating a website, they suddenly become thrift and don’t want to spend a dime. They end up finding a college intern who would set up a site for them in Flash, link their PDF menu and create the most disgusting website in return of free food for a month. That is a real story that I have heard from so many people.
Below are some of the tips and best practices that they should keep in mind to build a website -
1. Make it mobile friendly & responsive layout. For some strange reason 2 out of 5 restaurant websites that I view is built in flash. I never understand why. Knowing the fact that mobile usage has grown over last few years and more people are eating out, anyone can conclude that more & more people will be accessing website on a devices other than desktops. It is imperative that restaurant owners change their mindset and allocate a budget to hire a good web designer to create neat user friendly website for them that works well on all the devices. Here are couple of good examples of responsive design for restaurant’s website -http://www.lolitasrestaurant.ca/ & http://www.hinesburghpublichouse.com/. Galaxy | WEBLINKS LTD Call at: 888.666.4316 http://www.galaxyweblinks.com/
Restaurant website design best practices Moreover, remove Flash which is not good for SEO and your website’s rankings on Google. With flash, you don’t have a chance of getting any traffic from search engines.
2. Easy access to menu items Linking your menu to a PDF document is a very bad user experience for mobile as well as desktop. No-one wants to download a document if they want to quickly check your menu. (You can have a separate link for PDF download for your fans who may want to print the menu and don’t want to visit your website every time.) You need to have a very simple menu page that lists pictures, names, small description and price of each item. That’s all that matters to the consumer. If you have a long menu, it will be nice to restructure page automatically when viewed on mobile phones so that menus are combined together by category name e.g. Appetizers, Vegetarian, Seafood, Grill, Desert, Drinks. A good to have feature could be a separate list of “most popular/favorite” items. You can either collect this data from the customers or you can just your most sold items in this list.
3. Contact info & hours to be displayed prominently If you take reservation, you need to encourage your customers call you ahead of time by showing the phone numbers on all the pages, may be on the header. Showing location and hours information on footer will also be very handy.
4. Integrate Google maps on contact page It will be nice to show your location on Google maps on the contact page along with the complete address in plain text. Another good to have feature would be detecting customer’s IP address and get their current location and automatically show the direction on the page.
5. Facebook likes & tweets People love to share their feelings with friends and family. If you are providing awesome food & service, you shouldn’t shy away from allowing your customers Galaxy | WEBLINKS LTD Call at: 888.666.4316 http://www.galaxyweblinks.com/
Restaurant website design best practices share your restaurant on their social network. Make it easy for them to LIKE you and Tweet about you.
6. Pictures & photo gallery First time customer would always like to see how your restaurant looks like from inside and outside, how fancy or casual is the interior, how it feels when it’s crowded with people. Pictures at different times and occasions would be a good selling point. I feel it’s a good to have feature which is not very expensive to build. If you own a restaurant and would like to thrill your customers with an elegant user friendly website for your restaurant, please contact us: http://www.galaxyweblinks.com/contactus
Galaxy | WEBLINKS LTD Call at: 888.666.4316 http://www.galaxyweblinks.com/