Why is having a website for restaurant is important?
Because without a website, you will lose a huge potential from the online market. People now turn to the internet when they are looking for a place to eat. This makes it a must for you to own a restaurant if you want to stay in the restaurant business.
But, what you need isn't just any restaurant website. You need a restaurant website that has a good design.
What are the things that make a good restaurant website design, then? Can you make a good website design even though you don't have design experience?
Let's take a look at some tips that you can apply to create your restaurant website!
Elements of Great Website Design:
1. Design That Shows Your Restaurant’s Brand
A great website shows the brand of the website owner, and the same is true for your restaurant website.
But, what is a brand?
The brand is the identity or image of your business. For example, you want to let people recognize your restaurant as the most romantic place to have dinner.
When creating a website, you have to create the elements of your website, whether it's colors, images, text, etc., to build the image you want.
2. Lightweight and Minimalist Design
The most fun thing about designing a website is when you add images, videos, or features to your website. Decorating your website to look attractive is certainly an obligation if you want to have a website that looks attractive.
However, don't let your website content make your website too heavy.
No matter how good your website will be, if a visitor needs a minute or two to open it, or can't even open it, your restaurant website won't be able to have too much of an impact on your business and you could end up losing money for maintenance costs.
3. Strong Visual Design
Even though you have to make sure your restaurant website can be opened smoothly by customers, that doesn't mean your restaurant website’s design has to be too simple.
The key is balance. Your restaurant website should still have high-quality images and features that help customers, but still be able to be opened quickly by people.
You can do this by planning your website. You can start by answering what features your restaurant website needs. Then regarding branding, you can start sorting out relevant images and can show your business brand on your restaurant website.
4. Easy to Navigate
After you have a website with a strong visual design and can be opened quickly, you next have to make sure that people can navigate your restaurant website properly.
You can do this by having a good website layout. Generally, a restaurant website starts with a title page containing the logo, slogan, and the name of the restaurant. Then there is the about us page, menus, operation details, and contacts.
Of course, this is not always certain. You can experiment with the layout of your restaurant website. You can check out the best restaurant websites and learn how they organize the information on their website.
You can also create a navigation menu where visitors can just click on the section they want to visit.
5. Mobile-Friendly Design
In today's world, an extraordinary display, easy access, and a clear information structure is not enough to make a good restaurant website design. You need your restaurant website to have a mobile-friendly interface.
People now often perform searches from mobile, especially those related to the food and beverage business sector. You may have done it where when you or your family decide to look for a place to eat, you will grab your smartphone and start looking for restaurant websites.
A good restaurant website can accommodate that habit by having a mobile-friendly design. Just like how quickly your restaurant website can be opened by people, not having a mobile-friendly website will make people lazy to open your website from mobile and switch to other websites.
To get a clearer picture of good website design, let's look at some examples of restaurant websites that apply the tips above.
Examples of Restaurant Website with Good Design
• Atelier by Sofitel
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
• JiBiru Yakitori and Craft Beer
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
• SHAO
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Those are the tips that you can apply in designing your restaurant website. A good restaurant website design is a design that is attractive, shows the identity of the website owner, and is easily accessible, either via mobile or computer.
You might think that creating a website design that meets the above criteria is a difficult task, especially if you do not have any website design experience. You are not wrong. People are even willing to pay professional designers to design their websites.
Fortunately, you don't have to hire a professional designer to build your website now. You can use a website builder that offers website designs that meet the above criteria.
Strikingly is a website builder that prioritizes an attractive, mobile-friendly design that can help you brand your restaurant at an affordable price.
Let's see how you can build your restaurant website using Strikingly!
Steps to Create a Strikingly Restaurant Website
1. Choose Your Restaurant Website Template
Image taken from Strikingly website
With Strikingly, you can easily create your restaurant website using templates. Strikingly provides a collection of well-designed and mobile-friendly templates. You just have to choose the template you want and start building your restaurant website.
If you are still not satisfied with the choices, you can check out the best restaurant websites that have been created by other Strikingly users. You can learn how people build their websites and use them as your restaurant website template.
2. Build Your Restaurant Website Content
After you've chosen a template for your restaurant website, now let's start filling in the second home for your business.
What do you need on your restaurant website?
Pictures are, of course, the first thing you have to prepare. Make sure you have prepared pictures that are of good quality and can build the brand or image of your restaurant.
Apart from these two things, you have to make sure that your image is the right size according to image size specifications by Strikingly. You don't want your image to be cropped or appear too small which will ruin the aesthetics of your restaurant website.
Next, you need a story about your restaurant. For example, you can tell general things about your restaurant; your establishment date, location, and unique aspects of your restaurant.
Make sure the stories you build can help you build your restaurant brand or image. For example, you want to build a romantic restaurant image. So, you have to tell people the things that make your restaurant considered that way, for example, you can describe the atmosphere of a romantic dinner at your restaurant.
Then, you need to add details about your restaurant. These details include the complete location, schedule of operations, and menus in your restaurant.
Finally, you must share your business contacts on your restaurant website. These contacts can be in the form of emails, phone numbers, or social media accounts. Make sure you put up your most recent contact so that customers don't have trouble contacting your restaurant.
3. Add Features
Apart from content, your restaurant website needs features to function properly.
What features do you need on your restaurant website?
First, you can add the Live Chat feature from Strikingly. This feature can help you serve customers who are visiting your restaurant website. Customers can quickly ask about reservations or other things through this feature.
Image taken from Strikingly website
Live Chat from Strikingly also provides notifications via mobile and computer. This makes it easy for you to serve customers who ask through this feature.
The next feature that you can add is the newsletter feature. Through this feature you can send the latest news about your restaurant through your restaurant website.
Finally, you can make a reservation form on your restaurant website. This is of course very important to help customers eat at your restaurant.
4. Optimize the SEO of Your Restaurant Website
Image taken from Strikingly website
The amazing appearance and complete features are still not enough to make your restaurant website do much for your business.
Why is that?
Because you can get more benefit from having a website if your restaurant website can be found easily from search engines, such as Google. But, it is easier said than done since your website is just one of the many restaurant websites on the internet. This makes you have to compete with other websites to get customers online.
To get a chance in this competition, you must understand SEO.
Simply put, SEO is the ability for your website to be found by search engines. When someone does a search online, they enter keywords into the search engine.
For example, you are looking for "the best romantic restaurants in San Francisco." Search engines, such as Google, will then provide you with pages containing websites related to your search results.
How does Google determine which websites are related and which are not?
One way Google does that is by using the keywords you enter and search for websites that have similar keywords.
When you search for "romantic restaurants in San Francisco", Google will browse websites and look for websites that have keywords or content relevant to that website.
So, to increase the chances of your website being found by search engines, you should target a keyword and use it on your website, either as a title, description, or in the content of your restaurant website.
If you feel that all the information above is difficult to understand, you don't need to worry. Strikingly has provided an SEO Checklist that you can use as a guide to optimize the SEO of your website.
Those are the steps to create restaurant websites with Strikingly.
Good design is the key to making a good restaurant website. There are several criteria that must be met by a good website design.
A good website design must have attractive visuals without sacrificing the website's performance. A good website design must also be easy to navigate and mobile friendly.
Strikingly can help you create a well-designed website. With Strikingly, you can simply choose the template you want because all the templates from Strikingly have amazing designs and are mobile friendly.
Are you ready to create a website for your restaurant? Build your restaurant websites using Strikingly now!
