Your food might be the best in town, but in today’s digital market, your restaurant’s website is often still the first impression you make on a potential dinner. Your online property — your digital storefront — is just as important as your brick-and-mortar location, so it should be an extension of the experience you offer in the dining room. But how do you design a website that gets customers’ mouths watering and leads to online orders? Let’s dig in.
The Design & Layout
A mouth-watering design — one that converts visitors into customers and customers into repeat business. Your website should deliver the full experience of your restaurant and leave people feeling full just browsing it.
Display your top dishes in all their glory, smiling diners, and give visitors a complete outlook of how they’re going to feel while sitting in your dining room. However, be careful not to overdo it — a cluttered website can be as unappetising as an overstuffed burrito. Keep it crispy and let your visuals speak.
Apart from the design, your website’s layout also matters a lot. An expertly crafted restaurant website flows smoothly, leveraging established UX patterns to guide users seamlessly through critical touchpoints.
The thoughtful placement of CTAs, balanced white space, and a content hierarchy help users move through the site easily, promoting more user engagement. In turn, resulting in more orders through your site. The last thing you want is a customer to get lost on your site, cause if they do, they will almost certainly bounce.
Online Food Ordering Features
Nowadays, customers want to order at lightning speed with just a few taps on their phone. An efficient online ordering system can transform your business with more online orders. Ensure your menu is visible, easy to read, and easy to navigate online with tasty descriptions along with allergy information. Choose a state of the art online ordering system offering all the intuitive features to customers, such as order tracking, estimated preparation times, order customisation, multilingual support, and real-time menu updates.
Last but not least, make sure to integrate your POS system on your site. This enables customers to make online payments easily while allowing you to track sales both from online and in-house channels in real-time.
Ensure you have a compatible POS system such as the 3S POS complete restaurant solution so that it can be integrated within your website without any additional work or overheads. Don’t let your orders get lost in the abyss between the web and kitchen.
Colours & Fonts: Creating the Context
Colours and fonts matter a lot. Your choice, however, should depend on the type of your restaurant you have. You may consider more warming, richer tones for a steakhouse to trigger those taste buds, or cooler shades if you’re a seafood eatery. Select fonts that convey the right tone — fun for a food truck, sophisticated for an upscale bistro. Pick whatever you want; just make sure it relates to your unique style.
Mobile Optimisation
If your website isn’t mobile-compatible, you’ll be missing around 60% of the organic traffic. These days it’s absolutely crucial that your site be mobile responsive, i.e., it should work well on all screen sizes, including mobile and tablet, as more than half of web browsing is done using phones or tablets. Speed matters too — if your site takes more than 2 seconds to load, your hangry customers will bounce away quicker than a golden spud.
Easy Updates
Your website should be as flexible as your menu. Seek a content management solution that enables you to update specials, change prices, or add new items without having to call in the tech wizard each time. You need something easy to use, like your favourite chef’s knife.
Check out all of our menus at MenuAustralia to get an up to date menu for lots of restaurant and fast food joints around your area.
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