Before you start customizing the theme 一 playing with its colors, fonts, number of pages, URL structure, etc. 一 you need to define the goals of your restaurant website.
Naturally, the ultimate goal of any restaurant website is to attract a particular group of people (Italian food lovers/vegans/carnivores…), and to encourage them to come to a restaurant.
However, if you want to build a high-converting restaurant website, you need to be a bit more specific when defining objectives. Here are some examples of specific goals:
1. That at least 80% of the visitors click on the Menu page and spend at least 2 minutes checking the page out.
2. That 40% of the site visitors click on the Booking/Reservation item in the menu bar and actually, make the reservations.
3. That 20% of the visitors leave (hopefully positive!) reviews on your website.
Note: When defining goals, be sure to use the SMART method. Each letter of this acronym stands for one of the words that explain what the objectives should be like. S is for Specific, M is for Measurable, A is for Achievable, R is for Relevant, and T is for Time-Based.
By determining these specific goals, you’ll slowly but surely start to think about the design of your website. So, for example, if you want 80% of the visitors to click on the Menu page, you should make the page easily reachable and pixel-perfect. If you want 20% of the visitors to leave reviews, you need to make the section for reviews highly visible, and the process of leaving a review should be a piece of cake.
Bonus tip: Never add a .pdf menu to your restaurant’s website. Site visitors have a hard time viewing it on their smartphones, and .pdf files are extremely difficult to update. Just imagine that each time you want to add a new dish to the menu, you’ll have to take down the old menu, add a dish to the menu using some image editing program, and upload the new menu. That’s too much hassle over one single dish.
See what we mean?
Once you’ve written the goals of your restaurant website, you can move onto the next step.