A restaurant website worth visiting

Those of us who are actively employing social tools like Twitter and Facebook, likely point some of our post links to our own website or blog. Ideally not all of our tweets and posts are self-promoting. 1 in 12 should be your goal, sharing other great stuff as the majority.

But when we do link to pages on our own websites, do we have something worth visiting? This applies to far more than just social media link backs. When you’ve taken the time to set up a website and promote it in your advertising, menus, or association listings – are you making it easy for potential business to find the most important things they’re looking for?

When it comes to restaurant websites, many fall short of highlighting the obvious. And some clearly have dropped a few dimes on the pointless. Granted the visual appeal of your website is not the end-all be-all of attracting new business, but some sites go way beyond the eyeball-rolling threshold and actually make it more difficult to extract the most basic information visitors are looking for when making their dine out decisions.

A recent article from ChowHound prompted some genuine gripes about what most annoys website visitors who are just looking for a menu, hours, or location. In short, the most popular and easily remedied concerns include Flash animation, menu pricing and usability, auto-playing music, and easy to find location info.

Below is further explanation about why some of these concerns are valid, and how you can create a more inviting experience to your website visitors:

Flash animation

Yes, Flash is super cool to look at, especially for games and web banner ads, however…
No longer is Flash a recommended bell/whistle for a website. Flash has zero value for search engines and is not indexable. And when your home page (or worse, the entire website) – the page with the most opportunity to grab customer attention – is Flash, it will garner little if any traction on Google or other search engines.

Flash isn’t mobile-friendly. If someone wants to check out your menu or hours on their mobile device, and your home page is Flash, they’ll likely never get to that information. If your website was built on a WordPress platform (oh yes, we love WordPress!) a simple plugin will make any number of pages instantly accessible on a smart phone. Check out this easy tutorial on making your WordPress website mobile »

Iffy Browsers. Some of your visitors may have older browsers that can’t read Flash, or won’t posses the proper Flash player to view your website. Don’t count on them downloading a player just to see where you’re located, either.

Information Hide and Seek

Menus. The menu(s) should be accessible from every page, right up top with the other Very Important Information links, like location, hours, and contact info. Ideally the menus are not just PDF downloads. Although offering a PDF download option is good, presenting your menu in a copy/paste-able format is preferred for easy sharing. Not only will you make it easy for people to share all or part of the menu in emails, facebook, or for planning, but those pages are opportunities for SEARCH ENGINE GOLD. Don’t give the gold away to a PDF.

Location and Contacts. Like the menu, your location – all your location information like live map, phone numbers and email addresses – needs to be readily visible on all of your pages. You could even go as far as 156 Bistro (see this post) and park all kinds of “location” info on that page: social places, restaurant review pages, Foursquare participation info, every “location” you happen to be planted can be linked from your website. Allowing your customers to find you wherever they happen to be looking for you.

Ditch the music

Maybe you’re a hip night spot, maybe you’re a hotel piano bar. Regardless, if you want to promote the fact that you’ve got live music or just lend a little ambiance to your site visitors, consider providing links to your music lineup instead of an auto-play soundbite. Auto-play music and sound bites are a shocking surprise to someone who’s cruising your website in the workplace, and really have no value when making a dine out decision. Save the ambiance for onsite.

Be Attractive

Those in the restaurant biz know – presentation is everything. Increase your click-though rate, page views, and time spent on your website by keeping your presence fresh, updated, modern, and easy to navigate. Gone are the days of a big box with some standard buttons and sleepy copy. We humans are very visual, especially when it comes to food and beverage. We want to read delicious descriptions on the menu and see mouthwatering imagery: what your patio looks like, the entrance, chef, wine bar, and patrons having a great experience.

Help is right here

If you haven’t updated your website’s look-n-feel in the past couple of years, its time. Need a fresh look, SEO-tasty copy or total revamp for your website? That’s what I do. And you thought I was only about Twitter…

Let me know what ideas you have from the Contact page »

Read the original ChowHound article here »

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