In general, the food service industry is always in flux. Ingredient prices have consistently been on the rise, forcing restaurant managers and owners to find ways to review their menu items and come up with innovative ideas to keep their gross profit margins profitable.However, changing the menu prices or reducing serving size is the time-tested recipe for losing foot traffic. Hence, most of the efforts are dedicated to making inventory management more efficient,the kitchen less wasteful of resources, and increasing restaurant visibility locally through a robust website.
Restaurants and Branding Website Designs
A stunning website with an engaging, responsive, and user-friendly layout is crucial for any restaurant hoping to convert visitors into customers. This requires that the website developers (first of all) go beyond the normal “design and development” of the website and create websites that are not only search engine friendly but rather capable of branding your restaurant.
This strikes off usage of any templates.
Templates cannot brand a website since they restrict stylistic changes to the website, making it just another website that works well with search engines. This necessitates finding a team of website developers and designers who understand the specific user-experience of food-enthusiasts, and have the expertise and the experience in designing such websites.
Now, the problem that many restaurants overlook while investing in their website is that they keep their website separate from automated management solutions for their inventory, customer service, reservations and bookings, and order management.
They employ different solutions and try to integrate them with their website.
The result is a less efficient system of managing customer experience. The consequent friction reduces workforce efficiency, increases wastage, and in the end prevents the restaurant from working at optimal serving capacity. A restaurant can easily increase its productivity and sales by having a successful website that allows customers to easily find the restaurant and book reservations within clicks. This simultaneously streamlines the process of keeping up with managing reservations, inventory, workforce, and other crucial elements.
Restaurant Websites and the Need for Dedicated, Feature Rich, and Embedded Backend Apps
Realizing the lack of a robust website service for niche specific businesses some developers and designers have begun to offer dedicated web development services. These developers employ R&D and expert help to understand the niche (food service industry and restaurants in this case) and extend their services to include both front end design and development and backend tools for managing restaurant processes.
One such name is Herolocity’sInstaSite Business website design and development service. Their website services are backed by a robust app suite designed to cater restaurant-specific needs, increase productivity, streamline customer experience management, and boost sales. The apps can easily be added or removed as per your requirements, with a single click, yet offer a plethora of functionalities.
One such app is the food delivery app that lets customers visit your restaurant website, order and pay directly from your online menu. Furthermore, the restaurant manager and customers alike, receive real-time notifications on the order status. Primary features include:
- Restaurant menu builder— Allows you to create attractive restaurant menus organized in categories, and add unlimited number of products and descriptions, additional extras, size dishes and more.
- Pick up & Delivery— Add delivery areas, fees, pickup and delivery times, etc.
- Google Maps Integration — Lets customers easily see pick-up addresses and delivery areas before they order online.
- Accept Payments— Collect and process credit card details, use PayPal and Authorize.NET, cash on delivery, or wire transfers.
- Voucher System — Lets you create voucher codes for discounts.
- Multi-Level Admin Access — Add unlimited number of users with different level of access.
- Email & SMS Notifications— Create automatic notifications for employees and customers alike, set to trigger by different events.
- Responsive— The app is mobile optimized and can work across a diverse range of smart devices.
The app suite also includes a wide range of website apps and over 150 website applications to choose from.As a result, your restaurant not only receives a highly optimized design to convert customers and increase foot traffic but also to make the management process more efficient.
In Conclusion — Invest in a Branding Website with Dedicated Apps
Restaurants are always poised in a highly competitive market space where they have to fend off competitors and the food market itself. Having a website not only brands your restaurant and makes it stand out on Search Engine Results Page, but also offers a range of robust management solutions in the backend, making it the best possible investment.