If you are in the catering business, you must have already realized how important it is to have an online presence for your brand. These days, even businesses that do not directly make sales over the internet prefer to have a website, or at least a landing page, where they can showcase their services. You have an even more dire need to have a website in a catering business because your catering website could be the one-stop platform for your prospects to contact you and place orders with you.
However, this doesn’t mean sales will start coming in after creating an unresponsive, unattractive, low-featured website. You need to make sure that your website is user-friendly, easy-to-navigate, feature-rich, and appealing enough for visitors to want to browse through.
This might sound a bit overwhelming, though. Many people believe that you can only create a good quality website at a high price and long term. They assume that they would need to hire a full-time, professional web developer on high pay and spend months and months on end with him. You need to describe the kind of web design you want and coordinate with the web developer for weeks to key in the content as he continues to write the code that they’d be paying a high price for.
There’s really no need to go through this kind of headache in today’s day and age. There are website-building platforms available in the market that offer ready-to-use templates, which you can use as your web design. You don’t have to create your website design from scratch. You simply have to choose from the ready options available.
The ease of building a website doesn’t end there. Once you select a suitable template, you can customize it and build your content in it without writing a single line of code. You don’t actually need to hire a web developer at all. You can create your catering website all by yourself, with the help of the support staff of the website builder you use.
This post will describe the steps you need to take to build catering web pages on Strikingly.
6 Steps to Build a Catering Website on Strikingly
Here are 6 steps that many of our users have taken to build beautiful catering websites on our platform.
1. Sign Up for an Account
The first thing you need to do is access the Strikingly landing page and create an account by filling in your name and email address on the form. This is super easy, as we don’t ask you to fill up too many details. You don’t even need to provide any credit card details at this point. Our free plan offers sufficient features for you to get familiar with our tools and build a basic website.
Image taken from Strikingly
2. Select a Suitable Template
Once you sign up, you can select the most suitable among the catering website templates we offer. Our templates are divided into various categories, such as business, store, startup, portfolio, etc. You might want to look into a few of these categories for a catering website to see which one suits your needs the most.
Image taken from Strikingly
3. Key in Your Website Content
After selecting the template, you will get access to your Strikingly editor. This is where you can start uploading, pasting, or keying in your web content. Our drag-and-drop feature makes it super easy to arrange your content elements on your catering web page.
Make sure you provide the following content on your catering website.
- Basic info about your business includes a brief background, what you offer, how you deliver, and why people choose you over others offering the same service.
- Pictures of dishes you offer and your company or working environment.
- Your contact details and other means for prospects to get in touch with you.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
4. Integrate the Website with Social Media
For an effective all-rounder promotion of your business, it is essential to link your catering website with any social media pages you have. This will help drive traffic back and forth to spread your brand awareness among your target audience faster.
To integrate your website with social media, you can insert social media icons on the footer or in any other suitable corner of your catering web pages. When site visitors click on these icons, they will be taken to your business’s respective social media page. Make sure you update your customers with information about your services regularly on social media pages.
You can also insert social media handles on your catering web pages, which allow your site visitors to share these pages on their social media profiles. This will help them spread your word to their friends and peers and enhance your reach.
We also have a more advanced feature for social media integration on your catering website. You can insert the feed of your Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter into your catering web pages to show pictures of your food items. Do this with the following steps.
- From the left panel of your Strikingly editor, click ‘Add New Section’.
- Select ‘Social Feed’.
- Click ‘Edit’ in the newly added section.
- Choose the social media site you want to connect with.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
5. Work on Your Site’s SEO
An important task to do after creating your catering website is to work on its search engine optimization. If your website is not optimized, it won’t be discoverable for your audience, which means very few people will be able to visit it. You need a lot of traffic on your website to be able to drive sales.
There are two ways to enhance your site’s SEO: on-site and off-site. You can take care of your on-site SEO by using the right keywords in your web content. In your Strikingly editor, you must also write an appropriate and precise site description in the ‘Basic Info’ section of the ‘Settings’. Make sure to also write a suitable meta description for each of your catering web pages. The meta descriptions or meta tags are the snippets that briefly describe your page content in search engine results.
The importance of these small steps to take for your on-site SEO cannot be over-emphasized. Even the best catering websites can be ignored by the audience if their on-site SEO is not done correctly.
Consider guest posting on other people’s blogs for your off-site SEO, inserting links in your articles to your catering website. Strikingly also offers the feature to add a blog section to your catering website. If you have your own blog, you can post as many articles as you like, giving out information to the audience about the catering industry. This will help you establish yourself as an expert in your field, building trust and loyalty among your customer base.
6. Set Up Payment Options
If you want your customers to place orders and make payments directly through your catering website, you need to add a simple store section. Take the following steps to do this.
- Click ‘Add New Section’ from the left panel on the Strikingly editor.
- Select ‘Simple Store’.
- Add your packages in the form of products on your simple store.
- Set the price for each package, including the price of the food items and delivery charges.
- Select the payment methods you want to offer from the options provided. We provide Paypal, Stripe, and direct debit/credit card purchase options.
Image taken from Strikingly
The best catering websites have a built-in system like this for customers to place orders through them. If you really want to stand out from the competition, you’ll need to offer a smooth, error-free, and user-friendly mechanism for your site visitors to order from you from your website. Our Simple Store feature serves this purpose. It also encourages your customers to place repeat orders, especially if you can deliver to them on time every time.
Once you are done with all the steps described above, your catering website will be live. Your customers and prospects will be able to visit your site and read your catering web content. If they like what they see, they will place an order with you right away.
If you face any technical issues in running or maintaining your website, you can contact the Strikingly customer support team at any time. We have free 24/7 live chat customer support, where you can inform us about any problems you face. We’ll be there to look into your issue, respond to you instantly, and resolve the problem as soon as possible.
We like to give an enjoyable experience to our users in maintaining their websites and running their business. That’s why our users can then focus on the more important aspects of their business, like running their actual operations and promoting their business further.
While you manage your orders and enjoy making sales, we will ensure that your catering website keeps running smoothly at the backend. Thus without any further ado, why not create your catering website on Strikingly today?
