When you create a website for a restaurant, there are certain things that you need to take into consideration when putting the website together. Gone are the days of yesteryear when it would suffice to throw up a website with a single page on it that, with nothing more than just the restaurant’s contact information, and then call that a "restaurant website".

The Restaurant’s Website Is An Essential Part of the Dining Dining Experience

Indeed, in this day and age of dynamic web pages, multimedia content, and social networking, a restaurant website needs to more than just a "virtual business card". Although restaurants are in the business of serving food, the dining experience actually begins, not from the moment that the patron sets foot in the restaurant’s door, but from the moment the customer visits its website. Today, it is considered anathema for a business to exist without an interactive, dynamic, "living" website that engages customers by warming them up or conditioning them to come and buy from them or to patronize their facilities.

This applies just as much to restaurant websites as it does to most others type of business. When customers are making plans to dine out, they need to be able to garner key information about their dining options: location, travel directions and distance, what food items are on the menu, the price ranges, the type of atmosphere, the dress code, and the hours of operation.

Important Website Design Considerations

Therefore, when it comes to planning how to create a website for a restaurant, it is essential that you incorporate a certain set of very specific design elements. These design elements are are absolutely essential in order to maximize the quality of customer experience. You want the time that customers spend on your restaurant’s website to be productive and informative, leaving them with a positive impression, piquing their interest enough to want to dine with them.

If your website falls short in the implementation of any of these specific design elements, it could turn customers off and they may decide to dine elsewhere. It’s not uncommon for people to base their dining options on how professional the website design is. So it is imperative that you design and create a website for restaurants in such a way as to make the most of the customer’s time spent on your website. A professionally designed website can give your restaurant a competitive advantage.

Here are three of the most important elements that you must incorporate when you create a website for any restaurant, in order to stay competitive and win a customer’s business:

1. Comprehensive Online Menu

Perhaps the most basic feature that no restaurant website should ever do without is to have the restaurant’s complete menu available online. And this should not be some abridged made-for-online version of the menu. Whatever is available on the in-store menu should be available for viewing online. You could create a menu for free download in PDF format. Or it could be in some browser-friendly text format. Not only is this important for customers who wish to come to dine in at the restaurant. It is also important for restaurants that offer carry-out or delivery service. You could even go the extra mile and build it as an ecommerce website, where customers can place orders directly online.

2. Detailed Restaurant Information

Everything that anyone would ever need to know about the restaurant should be available on the website. This includes the basic essentials such as address, driving directions, phone number, fax number, e-mail address, and hours of operation. Additionally, it should offer a myriad of details to instill credibility and trustworthiness in the restaurant’s brand. For example, the restaurant’s history, a biography of the owner, the chefs, and the staff, would help to greatly personalize the restaurant experience. It should also be made very clear what type of food is offered, what type of attire is recommended, and what type of atmosphere is maintained onsite.

3. Keeping In Touch With The Customer

To stay competitive, a restaurant must entice customers to want to dine with them. The website should not just merely be a collection of static webpages. It should be alive and dynamic, and offer a means to keep in touch with customers. Periodic press releases, a frequently updated blog, and an opt-in e-mail list where special offers can be e-mailed to customers periodically, are just a few examples of how to keep customers engaged, so you can earn their repeat business and not lose them to the competition.

Brand recognition is another facet of customer outreach. Host the website using the restaurant’s name as the domain name if possible. Also ensure that your website uses the restaurant’s unique color theme, logo, and layout.

Building a successful restaurant business requires that you create a website that has a solid design. By incorporating these 3 design features into your website, you can be assured of building good rapport with, winning the confidence of, and earning the repeat business of your customers.