Three Qualities Of A Successful Restaurant Website

Do you know how long your time is to convince your website visitor to stay?

You only have 5 seconds.

Since 1999, I am helping small business owners in designing website and in their Internet marketing campaign. All these years, only few of them really talked about how to give right information to their website visitors.

I’ve seen hundreds of restaurant and small business websites that were designed to please business owners and not their customers. This is pretty common up to this time.

Flashy design, pictures of the owner (and their kids), colourful fonts, etc. Name it, they’ve done it.

On the Internet, the competition is always just one click away, so if you frustrate users they’ll head to your competitor’s website.

So here are 3 criteria that your website should be based on.

1. It says what you offer

With limited time, your website should be self-evident. Meaning, if your business is Italian restaurant, the graphics, design, pictures, and text should tell the visitor immediately that they are in an Italian restaurant website.

Do you offer delivery service? Do you accept Visa, MasterCard, etc.? Does it require reservation?

Do not bury all these information if you can present them immediately without sacrificing the professional design.

2. It says why they should pay a visit

Unless you offer online ordering, your website ultimate goal is to convince visitors to get off their computer chair and to visit your restaurant.Every single page of your website must be pre-selling your restaurant.

It should tell how good your food is. The delightful ambiance your restaurant offers. Your friendly staff. That services that they can’t find from anywhere else.

Persuade them. Remember that you’re not just competing with other restaurants; you are giving them good reasons why they shouldn’t cook for dinner and visit you instead.

3. It says where you are and how to contact you

   • This will help your visitors to easily contact you
   • This will help your website to rank better in search engines whenever people are looking for local restaurants or businesses.

Many people need to phone you to find more information about your restaurant. Aside from your contact information page, put your telephone number and complete address at the bottom of every page.

This will give you two benefits:

Your complete address is vital especially for your new customers.

If your location is in a busy district like downtown, traffic flow and parking are of concern to them. Help them solve their concern by giving them map and parking suggestions.

Hours of operation are another thing should be on your website. It’s so frustrating for a hungry customer to drop by only to realize your restaurant is closed.

So there you have it. These are non-technical suggestions but are foundation of successful restaurant website.

Now make sure your website passed all these criteria and expect to increase the number of new customers coming from your website.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 2nd, 2009 at 10:35 pm and is filed under Online Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.