Restaurant and Food Business Website Design in Gibbs

Someone checking a restaurant website from a phone usually has a practical question: What can I order? Are you open? Where are you? How do I place an order or make a reservation?

Those answers should arrive before the cinematic home page.

Put the essential information where people can find it

A visitor should not have to search through several pages to find current hours, location, phone information, or the menu.

The home page can surface the essentials and then link to fuller information where needed.

If hours vary by day, the actual schedule should be easy to scan. If the business changes hours seasonally or for special events, there should be a straightforward way to update the site instead of leaving stale information online.

Treat the menu as content, not a poster

A menu should be readable on a phone.

Whenever practical, menu text should exist as normal webpage content rather than only as a photograph or graphic. That makes it easier to resize, search, update, and read with assistive technology.

A downloadable document can still be useful when the business has a reason for one, but it should not automatically become the only way to discover basic offerings.

Prices, items, availability, and dietary information should only be shown when the business has provided current information.

Connect ordering or reservations only when they exist

Some food businesses use online ordering. Others take phone orders. Some accept reservations, and some do not.

The website should reflect the real workflow.

If an active third-party ordering or reservation service is already in use, the site can link to it clearly. There is no reason to bolt on another platform simply to make the website look more sophisticated.

If an outside service changes, the website should make the link easy to replace.

Use real photography without making the page heavy

Good food and location photography can help customers understand the business, but enormous image files can make the site frustrating on a mobile connection.

Real photos can be prepared at appropriate dimensions and compressed for the web while preserving enough quality to look good.

A focused group of useful images usually does more work than a large automatic slideshow.

Design around the mobile visit

A restaurant search often happens while someone is deciding where to go or what to order.

On a phone, the important actions should be obvious:

• read the menu;
• check hours;
• get directions;
• call;
• place an order through the real ordering method;
• make a reservation if reservations are actually offered.

These actions should not depend on hover effects or desktop-only navigation.

Keep routine changes manageable

Menus and hours can change more often than the rest of a business website.

The maintenance plan should match that reality. A business that changes a menu frequently needs a simpler editing path than one whose offerings rarely change.

The goal is not to give staff a complicated website-management job. It is to make the information customers rely on reasonably easy to keep current.

A Gibbs food business does not need to imitate a national restaurant chain online. Switchboard can build the site around current menu information, location, hours, and the real ordering or reservation workflow used by the business.

For a related next step, see Simple Website for a One-Person Business in Novinger and Repair Business Website Design in Millard.

For authoritative guidance on this subject, see Google's SEO Starter Guide.

See Also

• Getting a Millard Business Online for the First Time