The world has changed to a point where many businesses aren’t able to cope with it. The consumers of today are fundamentally different from the consumers from ten years ago, as the essential brand-experience starts much before the physical interaction. Customers today might choose to visit or not to visit a restaurant solely based on the online presence of their restaurant website.
As a result, if you want to win, keep winning, or just survive in the game, you need to have a great online presence. But how can you have a website that both looks great and works flawlessly? Here we have a holistic checklist that will help you with creating a stellar online presence.
The Essential Checklist You Need To Create A Great Restaurant Website!
Your restaurant website is the crux of your business’s online identity that can make or break your future growth prospects. Therefore it is an absolute must that you fully understand the in’s and out’s of how to create a website for your restaurant!
Here is you have the essential checklist that you must adhere to create a stellar website:
#1 Understand What The Needs & Desires of The Market
Your restaurant website is a customer-centric tool that enables you to reach a wider audience and convert them better. Hence you must conduct thorough research and analysis to understand what your target audience’s needs and desires are.
Once you understand what your audience wants, you can play off that desire to your advantage. The look and feel of your website have a direct effect on your restaurant’s reputation. Hence knowing what the market wants will greatly help empower you to make informed decisions.
For example, a restaurant that is looking to engage its existing customer-base will need a different development-approach than a restaurant looking to capture market share. Your online presence is a stark reflection of your business in the real world. Ergo you must be very clear in the type of brand message you craft for your website.
#2 Validate Your Restaurant Website Ideas Through Rigorous Testing
Creating your restaurant website is a complex and arduous task with many pitfalls along the way. In such a scenario, how do you ensure that you can create the best website for your business and nothing but the best? You must validate your website design ideas and put them through rigorous A/B testing to make sure that your end product is a stellar website.
Once you have honed in on what your market needs are and where you can cause maximum disruption, you must go all in. Ideate, design, and develop your website and have multiple prototypes of your designs. Let these different designs be tested in multiple ways to ensure that you get the best and most refined product in the end.
#3 Optimize Your Website’s Structure For Maximum Usability
Now that you have figured out the different elements of your restaurant website that work together well, you must now work on your cohesive design structure. You need to create a structure that will enable you to manage your website’s data in a way that declutters navigation, makes ordering seamless, and generates leads.
Your end goal must always be to deliver a great user experience to your potential customers who visit your website. Having worked with many restaurant businesses around the world we have had the first-hand experience in creating websites that are highly optimized for usability. Here are a few features that you need to have in your website in our perspective:
Online Ordering – Make it easy for customers to order online with integrated online ordering solutions within your website.
Location tagging – Simplify the way potential customers navigate to your establishment in the real world with embedded online map solutions like Google Maps
Pop-ups – Engage your customers better with intuitive website pop-ups that enable higher conversion rates. For example, like one of our clients here – Henry’s Sandwich Station
Multiple Locations Management – Enable yourself to manage multiple locations from your restaurant management system that is integrated with your website. Just like a solution we created for one of our clients – Vinos Wine Bars
Connect Social Media – Social media has become increasingly inseparable from our daily lives. Hence its integration into your website is non-negotiable.
A Good Story – Make sure to create a good About Us page telling your story of how you grew your business and what you stand for. As all customers love a good story behind their favorite brands.
#4 Create A Mobile Centric User Experience
The modern consumer is radically different from the ones of the past as mobile smartphones have become ubiquitous. Today nearly 51% of the global internet traffic is generated by mobile smartphones. Hence not factoring in them into your design and development process will be a grave mistake.
Mobile devices need a very different approach to design and development. Due to variation in screen resolution, limitation in size, etc. many design elements that look great on a desktop might make your website load slow or make it look hideous on the smartphone.
Therefore you need to have two separate development strategies for mobile devices and desktops. As both serve two different categories of users that can be turned into potential customers.
In Conclusion
The above points are not the gospel that you must adhere to or otherwise you’ll create a bad website. Far from it, these above-mentioned points are meant to act as guiding principles. That allow you to have ample amounts of wiggle room to enable your creativity to flow.