As a business, ensuring that you’re keeping up with the latest trends is crucial. One of the biggest trends facing many modern businesses is the need to open and establish a restaurant website – but this can understandably seem like a challenging process. Indeed, learning how to create a restaurant website comes with its challenges. However, our friendly experts are here today to give you some new ideas on where to get started; hopefully, this will help you create a new restaurant website or app for your brand that delivers value for all of your customers.
How to Create a Restaurant Website
Creating your new restaurant website is more than just clicking a few buttons and saying “job done.” Indeed, learning how to create a restaurant website can sometimes seem like an involved process – but there are plenty of excellent options you could consider in this regard. Fortunately, our friendly experts are here to help you find out a little more about the different options available to you in this regard.
Why is it Important to Create a Restaurant Website?
Before we go any further, we should start by defining why creating an online ordering app for your restaurant is so important. These days, most customers want to see their favourite restaurants with an online presence.
Not only does this make it easier for businesses to get in touch with their favourite restaurants, but it also helps ensure that ordering from your restaurant is easier. In turn, this reduces the chances of potential customers going elsewhere – supporting your restaurant’s profitability accordingly.
How to Create An Online Ordering Website for your Restaurant
At this point, we’ve clarified that building a restaurant website is crucial to keep your brand competitive and give customers top-quality services. But how can you actually go about this?
#1 Outline your Branding
It doesn’t matter whether you choose to create a restaurant website or app yourself or hire a designer. In any case, one of the first things you’ll need to do is work out what your branding looks like. In other words, what’s your logo, what style or message are you trying to convey to customers, etc? This process can seem time-consuming, but it’s a hugely important part of marketing your business successfully.
After all, there’s no point in developing an online restaurant website if it doesn’t match your themes. For example, someone looking for sophisticated dining is unlikely to order through a fun and quirky website (and vice versa).
#2 Learn Coding Languages
Once you’ve worked out your branding, the next step to create a restaurant website is to learn coding languages. If you use a website builder, you might not need to have so much coding expertise – but you will need enough knowledge of CSS and HTML, at minimum, to customize your new website and make it your own.
You can use numerous platforms to learn new coding skills, such as Udemy. However, be sure to allow plenty of time to learn, as CSS can be a little tricky if you’ve never coded before.
#3 Invest in a Website Template
At this point, you have your business’s branding in mind and know the basics of coding. Now, you can finally begin to create a restaurant website. If you have learned full coding, you can create the website from scratch; however, we would recommend using a pre-made customizable restaurant website template like Shopify and Wix to make the process a little more straightforward. Luckily, since you now know how coding works, you’ll be able to tweak the template to match your restaurant branding before you begin adding content. Check out our article on some of the best Shopify themes for restaurants.
#4 Create Brand New Content for your Website
Now comes the time-consuming bit – making your website’s content! Every great restaurant website should provide all the information your customers need to know comfortably in one place. As such, we’d recommend (at minimum) creating the following web pages for your new restaurant website:
- Homepage
- About us / brand history
- Your menu options
- Specials and events
- Your suppliers
- Commitments
- About the team
- Contact us page(s)
In addition, try to ensure you’ve created an online ordering app for your website; these often don’t come inbuilt with a template, which is where you’ll need your coding knowledge. If you’re struggling to find time to learn in-depth coding, though, don’t panic. Hang around until the end for an easier alternative to manually coding your own online ordering system.
#5 Publish Your Website
At long last, your brand new restaurant website is ready to publish! Make sure you’ve paid for a full domain name and publish the website for all to see. We also recommend connecting your website with Google my Business and sharing the website on social media platforms and the like. This can help get your brand’s website out there, allowing you to begin getting those first few visits from potentially interested customers.
The Easier Alternative: Creating a Restaurant app with OrderAX
In many cases, the above steps can seem time-consuming and tedious. However, did you know there’s a much simpler alternative to creating an online ordering app for your restaurant? The OrderAx app development platform is the ideal strategy to help manage your new app – and, better yet, it’s designed with restaurants in mind specifically!
You can use OrderAx to create your very own restaurant app completely for free – and, best of all, it offers a seamless and easy to use system that’s incredibly easy to customize based on your restaurant’s services.
OrderAx can also support payment processing, branding, push notifications, mobile ordering, store management, user searches, and more. This helps streamline your business’s management while allowing your customers the ideal new ordering platform to keep ahead of the trend. All of this comes without the hassle of learning coding languages or trying to explain your requirements to dedicated website designers. In short, OrderAx might be the perfect solution to streamline your restaurant’s management accordingly. Also check out our article on how to create a restaurant process if you decide to create a restaurant app for you business.
Final Thoughts
Managing a business is tough – but running a restaurant comes with even more unique challenges. However, this shouldn’t leave you feeling overwhelmed or worried; after all, there are plenty of different options available to help you learn how to create a restaurant website or online ordering app.
Hopefully, today’s guide will have helped you find out more about the importance of having an effective and reliable business website – and how you can start. However, if you’re still unsure, please don’t hesitate to contact our experts. We’ll do our best to help take your brand new restaurant online ordering app to new heights.