11 Essential Ingredients of a Perfect Restaurant’s Website
Creating a site design that helps to grow the popularity of a restaurant is quite difficult. In the process of its creation, you should consider every little detail: navigation and structure of the website, size, and color of the font, the location of key design elements, colors, texts, buttons and much more.
Many people think that creating a website design is as easy as pie. Perhaps that's why there’s a bunch of scary restaurant websites out there!
We will tell you in detail how to create an attractive website for a restaurant that your customers will want to visit!
The design of the site should fully comply with the theme and spirit of the place, be unique and mouth-watering. You can use a photo of your specialty as the main background,. It's the delicious, bright and beautiful shots of dishes that will motivate the customers more than anything else!
If you decide to use juicy photos as accents on the page, then you should choose neutral or pastel colors as the main background, that won’t distract the user's attention.
It’s a good idea to use video as the main background, but make sure that it does not slow down the load speed!
Navigation
Site navigation should be intuitive. It is a very good idea to make the top menu large and place the most important sections like About the company, Services, Gallery, Contacts in it.
Text
Choose a style, that is as simple and clear, as possible. It is crucial to briefly, concisely, but professionally describe your restaurant, revealing the most important advantages and focusing on the unique features of the place.
When you write about your dishes, promotions, and services, do it as if you are telling this to a best friend!
Fonts
The texts on your website should be readable: it is a good idea to mix and match a group of serif headings with the main text of the site, which will be sans serif.
Do not use a lot of different fonts - three fonts are enough for the site of the restaurant. Also, do not use unsuitable font combinations: for example, combining multiple fonts when writing website headers is extremely risky and can worsen readability.
High-quality photos
Photos of the interior and food are a very important element of each restaurant website. Usually, they become the strongest motivator for the visitor.
Photographs of the dish should be of high-quality, colorful and mouth-watering. But do not forget about the optimization: the weight of the images should not lower the website’s load speed.
The pictures of the interior are also worth paying attention to. The design and colors of the site should match the color of the interior of a restaurant, creating harmony.
Restaurant's history
Tell your visitors about your restaurant: looking at the colorful pictures of the interior and the menu, they will probably want to know what distinguishes your restaurant from other similar places!
Virtual restaurant tour
Show your guests the interior of the restaurant: we are sure that besides the delicious dishes, your restaurant has something to be proud of!
It is a great idea to arrange a virtual tour for your future visitors: in a case, they will be booking a table, they will be able to understand which place will be the most comfortable for them.
Menu
There are several tips for arranging your online menu:
- Make the dishes and ingredients designer;
- Each position in the menu can be tied to a photo and a lead-generating online order button if your restaurant provides home delivery;
- Ensure to add high-quality photos, made from different angles;
- Add discount and promotion modules;
- Customize the sliders;
- Do not forget about the quick search, placed in a visible place;
- Add the animation of dishes, if possible.
Online-order form
This is an additional service that you can offer to your customers and this is the reason why most people visit the site of the restaurant. Customize the online ordering form on the website and add another sales channel, increasing your profits!
Among the many solutions you have already heard about, here are a few things you can also add to the form:
- Reservations;
- Call back;
- Online payment option;
- Order in one click;
- The option to send a copy of the order by e-mail or SMS.
Social media widgets
- Social media buttons (links to the page or group);
- Share buttons;
- The ability to sign in and log in to your personal account on the website from social media accounts.
Contacts and address of the restaurant
Be sure to add the address and contact phone number on the home page of the site (the upper right corner is the «classics»). Add the GoogleMaps widget to the "Contacts" section, mark the place on the map.