Having a good restaurant is only the half of the battle in culinary industry. Why? Because the customer experience starts long before they actually visit your restaurant. Today, it begins from looking up a perfect restaurant online. In other words, your site forms people’s future expectations. It is the face of your brand that makes a solid first impression and reflects your level. If your restaurant website is poorly designed, it will turn away clients with high expectations. By visiting a site, they will expect to get in your restaurant exactly the same as its site promises. So how to make a perfect restaurant website design which gives customers a surety that they will not regret about visiting your restaurant? How to create a restaurant website design from start to finish? Here we have prepared a short guide that can help you to embrace this process step-by-step:
Build Your Restaurant Website
1.Determine the concept of your site
It may be a fine dining, family style dining, fast food restaurant serving burgers, etc. You should determine it clearly.
2.Find your restaurant’s key advantage
People come to the restaurant not just for food. Nowadays, offering good service and serving tasty dishes is not enough. So try to understand what is the unique competitive advantage of your restaurant and play on it when making your site. It could be anything, from an innovative idea of cooking dishes to a comfort location.
3.Determine your target audience
This step is crucially important. In order to create a perfect restaurant web design, you should first of all take your potential customers into account. Ask yourself who are you trying to target? Then, try to figure out as more about your clients as possible, from their preferences to the age group. For example, hard-headed vegans will be excited to see animated photos of crisp carrot and fresh salad while disoriented tourists will appreciate a detailed map.
4.Analyze omissions
Visit various forums, social networks, or services such Slack and TripAdvisor to find out what people love and hate. It will help you to determine the strengths and weaknesses of your restaurant.
5.Start creating content
Show your customers your superfine cook team and chef. Tell your story and intrigue them with your extraordinary cuisine. Include few panoramic photos of sunrise and sunset from the window of your restaurant, add video of cooking process, and some shots of your brand dishes.
6.Define your competitors
Then, go to their sites to determine their positive and negative features. Use this information to improve your service. Important: we recommend you to analyze your competitors’ businesses only after analyzing yours.
7.Check-up questions
The key elements of a restaurant website include an idea, design, content, navigation, and emotions.
Ask yourself the following:
- Does my restaurant website design correspond to my business?
- Is it more that just a beautiful picture?
- Is the content readable and useful?
- Does the website evoke emotive response?
- Can visitors always understand where they are and where they will go next?
Also, it is recommended to add a contact of a person responsible for corporate events: email, photo, international phone number, etc. Don’t forget to include social sharing buttons (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter).
8.Restaurant website design must-have features
Adapt your site for mobile devices. Nowadays, responsive web design is a must! Pay close attention to ease to use and visually appealing layouts. Remember: your web design must have a perfect mobile version, and should be 100% custom.
9.Update your restaurant website regularly
Non-updatable event pages or news are worse than their absence. So make sure that the information is correct and current. Refresh event map, menu, and photos. And don’t forget to leave some free space for new menu banners. As you can see, creating a world-class restaurant website is not a piece of cake. According to our experience, building a luxury restaurant website design takes several months for a team of a developer and designer to finish the task. In addition, it involves a work of other specialists like UX engineers, copywriters, and marketing strategist. We wish you good luck in creating your future extraordinary restaurant website design. In case if you need some advice from dedicated web design experts, please feel free to contact us. Our team will help you to build a website for your cafe or restaurant covering every aspect your customers interested in.