The hours live in three places
Your website, your Google Business Profile, and your Facebook page. When they disagree, Google trusts the profile and your customers get angry at you.
Web design for restaurants
Your menu is your website. Everything else is decoration.
People come to a restaurant website for three things: what you serve, what it costs, and whether you are open right now. We build sites that answer all three in the first two taps, put the menu on a real page instead of a PDF, and keep ordering under your own name where you keep the margin.
Owner-run, based in East Canton, working across Northeast Ohio. Same web design process we use for every industry we serve.
How a table gets lost on a Friday night
- 6:41 pmSomeone searches your name on a phone in a parking lot. Google shows your hours, your rating, and a link.
- 6:41 pmThey tap through and get a PDF menu. It opens zoomed out at four point type. They pinch, give up, and go back.
- 6:42 pmThey tap the next restaurant. That one has a menu page that scrolls.
- 6:43 pmYou never knew they were there. Nothing in your analytics will tell you why the table stayed empty.
Build the menu as a page you can edit
A menu that lives in a design file and gets exported to PDF is a menu that goes stale. Prices move, the fish changes, the kids menu gets a new item. If updating it means calling somebody, it will not get updated.
We keep the printed menu design for the table and build a separate web version that a phone can read at arm's length. They do not have to look identical. They have to say the same thing.
What the web menu needs
- Real HTML text, so it can be read on a phone, searched, and picked up by Google
- Sections that collapse on mobile: appetizers, entrees, kids, drinks, desserts
- Prices that you can change yourself in under a minute, without emailing anyone
- Allergen and vegetarian markers, because the person with the restriction picks the restaurant for the table
- A daily or weekly specials block you can update from your phone before service
Hours are the thing you will get wrong
Holiday hours are the ones people check
Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and the Fourth of July drive more hours lookups than any ordinary week. We build a holiday hours block that is easy to set and easy to clear.
Kitchen close is not the same as close
If the kitchen stops at nine and the bar runs to eleven, say both. This is the single most common complaint on restaurant reviews we read.
A closed sign belongs on the site
Equipment failure, a private event, a staffing week. One banner on the homepage saves a night of phone calls.
Where the order gets placed decides what you keep
Ordering through a marketplace
The apps bring you customers you would not have had, and they take a percentage of every order plus a delivery arrangement you do not control. Nobody who orders through them becomes your customer. They become the app customer who happened to eat your food.
Ordering through your own site
You pay card processing and whatever your ordering provider charges, and you keep the customer, the email address, and the ability to run your own promotion. It will never replace the apps entirely. It does not have to. It only has to catch the people who were already looking for you by name.
We do not tell restaurants to leave the apps. We tell them to stop paying a marketplace for the customers who typed the restaurant's own name into Google.
The catering page is the one that pays for the site
Most restaurant sites bury catering, private dining, and party trays under a contact link. Those are the highest ticket inquiries you get, they come from office managers and families planning weeks ahead, and they are searched for by name: graduation party catering, office lunch delivery, banquet room.
Give each one a page with the packages, the head counts you handle, the lead time you need, and a request form that asks for the date. That form is worth more than every other form on the site combined.
Pages we usually add
- Catering and party trays
- Private dining or banquet room
- Gift cards
- Careers, because hiring is a search too
- Weekly specials that you update yourself
Questions from owners and managers
What is wrong with a PDF menu?
It opens as a document, not a page. On a phone it lands zoomed out and unreadable, it cannot be indexed the way a page can, screen readers usually make a mess of it, and you have to open a design tool every time a price changes. A menu built as a web page fixes all four of those at once.
Do we still need a website if we are on the delivery apps?
Yes, and more than before. The apps own the people browsing for food. Your website is for the people searching your name, and those are the ones with the highest intent: they already chose you and just need the hours, the menu, and a way to order or book. Handing that traffic to a marketplace means paying a commission for a customer you already had.
Can we take orders directly through the site?
Yes. We connect the ordering platform you choose so the checkout runs under your own branding, or we can build a simple pickup order form if your volume does not justify a platform fee. We will tell you honestly which one your order count supports.
How do we handle reservations and waitlists?
Most restaurants already pay for a reservation or waitlist service. We link to it prominently rather than building a second booking system that your host stand does not watch. If you take reservations by phone only, we make the phone number tappable and say the hours the phone is answered.
What does a restaurant website cost?
Builds start at $500 and are quoted per project, mostly depending on the menu size and whether ordering is connected. Hosting starts at $15 a month with the SSL certificate, backups, and updates included.
Send us your menu
A PDF, a photo of the printed one, whatever you have. We will show you what it looks like as a page and quote the rest of the site from there. Builds start at $500, hosting starts at $15 a month.