These are difficult times for restaurant owners. After all the consideration and thought put into your interior design, menu development and ambience creation to make your guests feel comfortable, being forced to close your doors for the majority of the past year will have had serious consequences on your revenue.
Many restaurants have turned to takeaway options or joined the ever-growing trend of offering cook-at-home boxes, but to be able to attract the critical trade needed to continue operations, have you put the same thought into your website design?
Whether you’re wanting to advertise the meal options available, or be prepared for eventual reopening with booking and COVID-19 measures and requirements a website is a necessity.
We have put together some tips to help you design an engaging website for your restaurant.
COVID-19 updates
Hospitality venues will reopen again one day soon, but measures will still be needed to ensure COVID-secure compliance. Your website should have up-to-date information about the safety measures you have in place, such as:
• Face masks required for staff in public areas
• Hand sanitiser available to guests and staff
• Tables disinfected between guests
• Tables rearranged to ensure a distance of six feet
• Single-use or sanitised menus
• Contactless ordering and payment available
• Takeaway and home delivery available
Align Your Web Design with Your Style
To make the right impact, it would be advised to use the same branding, colour schemes, and fonts on your website as you do in your restaurant. Align your website with your restaurant concept and the type of food your serve to express your values meaningfully, position your restaurant in the market, and make your website recognisable.
Tell Your Story in a Unique Way
An ‘About Us’ page is a great way to describe your concept, idea and vision. Tell the story of your career as a restauranteur, and biographies of key staff to create an authentic and original story that will start conversations.
Use Impressive Images to Showcase Your Menu
Use original, eye-catching photographs of your dishes to help expand on your online storytelling and to represent your menu authentically. Avoid stock photography, as you want to stand out, not use the same images that your competition may also be using. You can use smartphone photography for your social media updates.
In addition to meals, you can also represent your wine list, cocktail menu, desserts and other specialities that you offer. This will help you show your entire menu online and impress your visitors right from the start.
Implement an Online Reservation System
As a survey from the Restaurant Magazine showed, around 80-85 per cent of reservations come through a website and 47 per cent of them originate from a mobile phone. Due to the COVID-19 lockdowns, this number has even increased.
Ensure you have an online booking system, which will be invaluable once you are permitted to have guests on your premises again.
Make Your Contact Information Instantly Visible
A ‘Contact’ page should include your phone number, address, email address and hours of operation. You can also use this page to give directions, and how your location on a map, or locations of other branches of your restaurant.
Optimise Your Website for Local Search
There are more than 63.5 million searches on Google for a variation of the phrase “restaurants near me” every month. By optimising your website, you can make sure that your restaurant is among the first results for your local audience.
Finally, to engage visitors, your restaurant website needs to be functional, informative, mobile-friendly and easy-to-navigate.
If your restaurant is looking for website design in Scotland, talk to us today.