26 April 2010

How to Enhance and Better Utilize Your Website

Posted by Crystal under: Recession Tips & Tricks; Restaurant Business .

Internet can be a great resource for any business, and it is becoming especially important in the restaurant industry.  Just about any restaurant has a website; however, restaurants utilize their websites with different degrees of success.  Here are the best practices of how to optimally use your restaurant’s website:

Use Photography. Internet is a visual marketplace.  When people browse for information, especially when it is food-related, they want to see pictures.  Using high quality photography on your site is the best way to properly convey the brand image of your restaurant.   Use high quality, high resolutions photos to showcase your restaurant’s décor, ambiance, and convey the overall atmosphere and mood of your establishment.   Promote and market your restaurant with the help of photography.   Include photos of people who represent your restaurant: chefs, servers, and even guests.  And even more importantly – provide vivid and attractive photos of restaurant’s menu items and drinks to lure customers in.

Introduce Who is Who. As you make your restaurant’s website more visual with more photography, it is also important to provide relevant and interesting background information about restaurant’s key people.   Emphasize the passion and other great attributes of people who work at your restaurant.  This includes owners, chefs, and servers.    People love to read about the faces behind the operation; and with this strategy, you’re likely to attract even more new customers.  Make your website more real by introducing the real people who work at your restaurant.   This will help you differentiate your establishment from your competitors, especially chain restaurants.

Career Section. Restaurant’s website is an excellent medium to have a well-organized section devoted to hiring and employment.  Start utilizing online job application forms on your website.  Next time you post a craigslist ad looking for servers, provide a link to your online job application and guide potential job applicants to your website.  This will save you both time and effort in collecting and assessing information about potential candidates.   Keep the employment section of your website constantly updated, posting relevant info about open positions or detailed job descriptions.

Menu is one of the most popular pages on the majority of restaurant’s websites.  That is why it is so important to have an updated, detailed, and attractively-looking menu on your website!  Make sure you post all types of menus, including dinner menu, breakfast or lunch menu, dessert menu, drinks menu, wine list, etc.  Include the prices, provide pictures, and also regularly post any specials during a particular week or season.

Design. It is important that your site has an overall attractive web-design.  Having a well-designed website is now cheaper than ever.  With a large number of web designers providing freelancing web-design services online, it is easy to get a good deal and have a decently looking website at an affordable price.  It is equally important that your restaurant’s website design reflects your establishment’s personality.  If you have an upscale fine dining place, so should be the website design.  If your restaurant concept is trendy and contemporary – reflect it in your website design as well.

Contact Form. Last but not least, make sure you have listed different ways of communication your guests can use to get in touch with your establishment.  This may include electronically submitted contact form, e-mail address, subscription to the newsletter, Twitter account, Facebook page, and, of course, telephone number and your physical address.

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