Hi, my name is Lilly Ghahremani, and I am a web strategist for Tiny Frog Technologies. I wanted to talk today about the top mistakes that restaurants make with websites.
You know when we’re hungry, or we’re planning a night out it’s a common practice to check a restaurant website and actually, it’s kind of a joke in the industry that restaurant website designs just do not do those restaurants service. Bad restaurant websites are everywhere and you’ve probably encountered them yourself. So today, I want to talk about really how to avoid these pitfalls and how to make your restaurant website extremely strong.
On your restaurant website, people are looking for two things: first, they’re looking for information to determine if they want to eat there. Secondly, they may be looking for information because they’ve already decided they’re going to eat there and they need a bit more information. The must-have features for your restaurant website that will make the difference between a great website and a poor one:
First of all, you want to have your menu up there. You want it to be one that is clear and direct and one that ideally doesn’t take a ton of time to download. Sometimes restaurant menu websites will be beautifully designed but due to the web serving that they’ve got going on it doesn’t download properly, or it takes a long time. People are hungry, they want to see what you offer, make it easy.
Second of all, you want information on your hours and you want information about takeout options if that is an option. If you offer takeout or delivery it is important to make this crystal clear and be sure you have the right integrations, meaning – to get away from the web language – making sure you have the functionality on the site, that if they click, they go to a system that helps them easily do that and this is where having a strong team that can do web development and integrate these sorts of functionalities so they work well on your website is going to be so important.
Next, if you host events you have to think about how that plays into the website. Do people want to see what that space looks like? Do you need to have a photo gallery? Do you need to have information for party planners? Consider whether that information needs to be on your site. One of the biggest things restaurant websites need on their site is a phone number that you answer. You’d be surprised how many have a phone number that just rings and rings. Once people have made that decision to go from your website to the phones, you want to make sure someone’s there to receive
the business.
Mobile compatibility is another issue for a lot of restaurant websites. Fortunately, the sites that we do here at Tiny Frog are all mobile compatible, meaning that no matter whether they’re looking on a phone or a tablet they’re going to be able to have the web experience you want them to have.
Finally, if you’ve got great restaurant reviews feel free to link to those review sites or to encourage website visitors to go and review you to keep building up business. Once you have a great website, the secret sauce is in making sure to check on it from time to time, to be sure it still accurately reflects what your business is doing and what you’re offering. So I would recommend from time to time, let’s say every quarter that you schedule a little reminder on your phone to check the website, check the menu. Are you still serving all those things? Are the hours still accurate? And so on. You want to make sure your website is up-to-date and is as beautiful and wonderful as the meals that you create.
To get the most out of your restaurant website the process really needs to begin with careful planning and thoughtful strategy. To that end, I’m Lilly Ghahremani, Web Strategist for Tiny Frog Technologies and if you are looking to do a new restaurant website we would love to talk to you. Please feel free to give us a call.
