A website is an essential marketing tool for restaurants, but launching one is not easy.
Running a restaurant is debatably one of the most difficult businesses to take on. Yet, experienced professionals do it every day, with the help of hard working staff, excellent offerings and modern marketing tools that entice patrons to walk through their doors.
A website is one of the most important marketing tools for restaurants.
Not only does a site solidify your online presence, it enables people to visit your site, view menus, check the price-range of meals, and get an idea of the overall atmosphere. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to rebuild or launch a restaurant website.
The goal is to make your restaurant website the best it can be, and CX3 Digital is already a proven leader in this arena. Let’s walk through the building of a restaurant website and go over any adjustments you might need to make for your particular type of venue.
It’s common to miss some of the necessary pages for a restaurant website, so here’s a list of some popular pages to include:
- Homepage
- Menu
- Reservations (You might integrate this with a service like OpenTable or find a reservations plugin you like.)
- Contact Us (With maps and phone numbers)
- About the Restaurant
- Cooks (To show how experienced they are and to put some faces to your business.)
- Links to social media pages
- Ratings and Reviews
- Testimonials
- Video and image galleries of your food and the building (indoors and outdoors)
Are You Ready to Build a Restaurant Website?
What’s great about utilizing a web design agency is that you can integrate your new or updated site with whatever marketing you are currently using. This includes traditional as well as digital marketing and, of course, social media. Social media, done correctly, is critically important for restaurants today.
So, if you haven’t already, or within the past couple of years, you simply have to clean up and revitalize your website and make it more presentable, responsive and useful to your customers and prospective customers..
As you walk through your restaurant website design with your web designer, start with thinking like your ideal potential guest . That is often all you need to lay the foundation. Make the information they are seeking, the focal point of your website. Quite often this is a menu, your hours, any specials and a way to contact you or even make reservations online.
Next, adjust the content and add additional modules to fit your own brand and business. Create a user-friendly, responsive (easy to view on mobile devices) menu, test the user-experience, then launch it for everyone to see!
If you have any questions about building a restaurant website, let us know in the comments section below.
