Ankit Vora
Jun 15, 2022

5 Restaurant Website Design Tips Boise-Based Restaurants Should Consider in 2023.

“Your website is the center of your overall digital ecosystem. The experience matters once the customer enters – just as much as the perception they have of you before they walk through the door.”
– Leland Dieno

Did you know that over 77% of diners check a restaurant’s website before visiting? That’s an insanely high number.

This means that it doesn’t matter if you run an Indian, Chinese or Italian restaurant – about three-quarters of your potential prospects will hop onto your website (if you have one).

BUT!

What if you don’t have an online presence? If that’s the case, in my opinion, you’ll be missing out on a massive chunk of your potential diners. And chances are that they may book reservations with one of your competitors.

And even if you have a website for your Boise-based restaurant, it won’t matter if it takes more than five seconds to load or looks cluttered and isn’t mobile-friendly.

If you’re spending money on website design and development, it’s vital to ensure that you’re doing it right.

By doing it right, we mean building a visually appealing and highly functional website that even your competitors will admire.

And most importantly, it’s crucial to build it for your potential customers.

Building a visually appealing and highly functional website will take time. At the same time, you will need a team of talented website design and development experts (check out our work) to help you out.

To help you navigate the realm of restaurant website design, we’ve put together this blog post. Throughout this article, we’ll be looking at the five incredible website design tips that Boise-based restaurants should consider. And we’ve made sure that these tips can be applied and implemented by every restaurant out there – no matter the type of food you serve.

So, let’s dive into it straight away.

5 Restaurant Website Design Tips to Consider in 2023

Here are five website design tips for local Boise-based restaurants:

Don’t be afraid to showcase your menu
Use images
Ensure consistency in your theme and design
Invest in storytelling
Laser-focus on the user experience

Don’t Be Afraid to Showcase Your Menu

Think of your restaurant website as your online spokesperson. We’ve seen many restaurants afraid to showcase their menu on their website – just because it may seem too sales-y. But that’s not the case.

The reason why your potential customers are on your website is because they’re looking for more information. They’d like to understand whether or not you’d provide a good experience for them. Looking at a menu will help them with their decision.

If you don’t showcase your restaurant menu on your website, they may have to hop onto a food delivery app or dine somewhere else.

Along with the menu, we’d advise you to incorporate:

Online Order Button or Page – if you deliver food.
Store Locator – to make it easier for potential customers to find your restaurant.
Social Media Buttons – to increase your social media following and make sure that your potential customers interact with you on social media platforms.
Feedback Button – get more eyeballs as you ask your customers to drop their valuable feedback on Google or other review sites.

At the same time, we’d advise you to have a dedicated page where you can show your restaurant’s vibe, look and feel. After all, your customers are paying for the delicious food you’re serving and the experience.

This brings us to our next point.

Use Images

As we mentioned, your customers aren’t paying top dollar for the food but the experience. And when we say experience, we mean your restaurant’s service, look, and feel.

You can buy fries from a local place for $4. But at a high-end restaurant or one with a unique atmosphere, they will charge you maybe $8 or $10.

The luxurious restaurant isn’t just charging you for fries. Instead, they are also charging you for a high-quality experience.

People don’t mind paying for the experience. And you’d want them to show the kind of experience your restaurant offers, so we’d advise you to strategically add high-quality photographs of your restaurant across your website.

At the same time, it’s important to make sure that you aren’t cluttering your website with too much content. Have minimal text and let your restaurant images convey the story on your behalf.

Ensure Consistency in Terms of Theme & Design

If you run an Indian restaurant in Boise, it’s important to ensure that your restaurant website has that authentic Indian look and feel. If you run an Italian restaurant, your restaurant website must have an authentic Italian look and feel.

No matter the food you serve, your physical location and restaurant website’s theme and design should be consistent.

If your website has an American look and feel, there’s no point if you run an Indian restaurant. And vice-versa.

At the same time, it’s really important to focus on visual elements, especially if you are trying to position yourself as a credible and trustworthy restaurant.

If your physical restaurant has a farmhouse vibe, it’s essential to make sure that your website visitors feel the same. Inconsistency will just result in confusion and may even result in disappointment.

So, it’s really important to make sure that you are ensuring consistency in terms of theme and design.

Invest in Storytelling

Storytelling is an art. There are gazillions of restaurants out there putting a bunch of random facts in front of their potential customers like:

“Hey! Did you know that 100% of our customers genuinely reported that our Indian food feels authentic and makes them imagine that they’re sitting at a roadside restaurant in India?

Or something similar!

The thing is – your customers don’t care.

They won’t care if you put a bunch of random stats and facts in front of them because every single business out there is doing it.

And while, at redfox visual, we also back our claims with stats and facts, and we also invest in storytelling.

We love to add creativity to our digital assets.

Recently, we wrote a brilliant piece titled “How to Use Creativity to Build Trust & Increase Awareness in Content Marketing.”

If you read this article, you’ll find that we invest in storytelling.

We do it because humans are programmed to respond to good storytelling. Imagine sitting down and watching a 2-hour movie where there’s no storytelling – just a bunch of random guys presenting random stats and facts in front of you.

The reason why we movies – we love stories.

We can connect to them.

That’s why LinkedIn posts with good stories work over posts with many random stats and facts.

You should harness the power of storytelling.

Convey your restaurant’s story. Your website’s “About Us” section is the perfect place to do so. Doing this will help you convey your message to your audience and get them emotionally invested in your restaurant business.

Here’s a must-read Forbes article to give additional insight: “Why Storytelling Beats Statistics, But Only About 100% of the Time.”

Laser Focus on the User Experience

Ryan wanted to check your restaurant’s menu.

So, he visited your website.

It took seven seconds to load your homepage.

He cursed his internet for being slow.

But as he went ahead, he discovered it was a problem from your end.

He didn’t bounce off and wanted to give your website a chance.

But wait – he couldn’t find the menu.

Also, there was no option to contact your restaurant or order food online.

Avoid having a website just like the one Ryan visited.

There’s no point in having a great design if your website is not functional. Imagine your website visitors having to spend seven hours for your web pages to load. They’d instantly bounce off.

At the same time, imagine if they keep coming across 404s. As important as having a great website design is, what’s equally important is having a highly functional website.

Suppose you don’t deliver a great virtual experience. In that case, you’d not only be making a bad impression, but your potential customers would not trust you to deliver a good on-site experience.

So, it’s really important to make sure that you are laser-focusing on delivering a good user experience to your customers.

As we mentioned already, your website is the virtual front desk of your business. And as much as you have invested in your restaurant’s physical appearance, if you invest even 0.1% of it on your website, you’d have a brilliantly crafted website for your Boise-based restaurant.

At redfox visual, we’ve helped dozens of local businesses build websites that have helped them connect with their customers. We don’t just build websites. We build experiences.

And that’s what we’d like to help you out with.

Hire the #1 Digital Marketing Agency in Boise today!

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