During a recent trip to Washington D.C., I was startled at the number of people cruising Yelp and other websites using smart devices while out and about. These days, when your potential customers find themselves in unfamiliar neighborhoods, they look up where to go on their smart phones and computer tablets.

So if your site is unreadable on these smart devices, you are missing out on many customers (butts in seats). Do something about it – now is a great time to update any website. The advent of content management systems and open source technologies has brought prices down to historic lows for quality websites (that work on smart devices).

We tell kids to turn off the lights and close the refrigerator door to save money. We also pay attention to things such as defrosting, nighttime ice production, and ensuring refrigerators have the right amount of space around them to maximize savings. Why not also at work? (more here 3 Easy Refrigeration Energy Consumption Tips To Save Money)

Enclosures can also save you a considerable amount – again, we tell kids to close doors and not linger in the doorway.  If you don’t have double doors at your location, every time a customer walks through the door your heat and/or air conditioning dollars go right out the same door. Consider adding double doors or a temporary winter entryway.  I’ve also seen some restaurants use an even simpler approach by adding a big curtain in front of the door.  Nothing is worse than sitting down to a nice meal with your coat off only to have that gust of freezing or hot and humid air hit you every time the door opens.

During the summer months, turn down the AC – the last thing your customers want is to feel like they stepped into your walk-in freezers! If the outside temperature is 90 degrees and humid, having your restaurant set at 75 degrees and dry will feel nice and refreshing.  Rule of thumb – if your customers are rubbing their arms or reaching for a sweater, it’s too cold.

A few more quick and easy tips – if you notice drafts, go around and seal them up – a peel-off silicon sealer goes for $7 dollars a tube. Turn off lights that are not in use and replace inefficient bulbs with high efficiency ones. Replace old inefficient appliances.  An old dishwasher or refrigerator will cost a home owner $20 – $30 extra per month to run. Do the math – you’re throwing money away and letting it blow out the door.

You know what else I hate? Driving directions. You put your address on the site, and then rather than put a map, or a link to Google or Mapquest or Bing which can all calculate specific routes for people, you put directions.

From the North: If you’re coming down I-93 from the North get off at the Such and Such Exit, and take a quick right….

You know what people expect these days? An actual map, and you can do it really easily with some flair. Just check out the Boloco locations page we just put up. It uses Google’s API so you have a dynamic map on the page, and customized little icons to show where the restaurants are located, as well as addresses and a zip code finder to find the closest location. Whether you have 1 location or 100 using a map application like this is practically a necessity these days. If you’re not doing it, you’re losing business.

Don’t make it hard to find your restaurant. Make it easy at a glance, and let people determine their own driving directions. oRestaurantDesign can help you implement a Google Map for your restaurant on your website as part of our basic services. It’s necessary, you need it, so we’ll help you make one. Just another example of what you get when you sign up with us.

If you’re interested in a free trial contact us today.

Think about it this way…

In 1995 only 1 in 10 Americans had internet access. Five years later in 2000, that number was up to 5 in 10. Today there are over 300 million people in the United States, and over 240 million of them are online.

That’s nearly 80%, and it’s still rising every year.

When it comes to teenagers, the number is over 95%.

Today over 75% of U.S. households use the internet as an information source when shopping LOCALLY for products and services like restaurants. That is, when they want to buy something locally, or find a local service whether it’s a hair salon, or a restaurant, or a contractor, they search online for it.

60% use the internet as their ONLY source of information as they’ve ditched the Yellow Pages. Think on that if you’ve spent money for a Yellow Pages ad recently. 60% of American households don’t even let that book in their door anymore. It goes from the stoop to the trash (or probably the recycling).

Over half of Americans surveyed say they “shop online, purchase offline”. That is that even though they look for products and services on the internet, they still prefer to find what they want and then call, or physically go to a store to purchase it. Just because they’re searching online for a restaurant, doesn’t mean they’re not interested. They want to look you up and check you out before they go buy food from you.

In fact nearly 90% of people searching for local products and services such as restaurants, follow up their searching with “offline” contact with the actual business. Basically if they’re looking for a good place to get mussels, and they find your restaurant, and like your website, 90% of them are going to come in to check you out.

So for any particular age group from teenagers to adults, the chances they have internet access these days is anywhere from 80 to 95%. The vast majority of those people use the internet to find local services and products like restaurants, and even a super-majority ONLY use the internet to find new restaurants. And if they find your business and you offer what they want, over 90% of them will follow up with you by coming in.

Also 90% of the searching is done directly through search engines, and the majority of those people don’t search past the first page of search results, and barely any past the third page of results. Those people are likely to look at no more than 3 to 5 websites, and are most likely to contact and follow up with the one which looks the most professional, and is the best designed, and conveys the right information.

Lastly, even if your restaurant runs on referrals, the best place for those these days are on social networks tied into your website. Over half of all Americans are on Facebook, and a quarter of them are over the age of 45. It’s not just for kids. In fact 60% of Facebook users are over the age of 25. Referrals for products and services via links in Facebook are trusted by nearly 80% of users (versus trust levels for an advertisement that are under 20%).

Is there a decent Ethiopian restaurant in town? A question posed on Facebook with a link to your website, is almost certain to bring you new business.

So you tell me. Does your small local restaurant need a good website and social media presence?

If you want even something like a garden to thrive you’ve got to tend it. Water it when it doesn’t rain. Weed it. Put up sticks for the peas to climb, to hold the tomato plants up. It’s not your whole day (as long as it’s not a huge garden of course), but it’s something you keep an eye on, do a few minutes every day, maybe a half hour, and then let it work for you.

But if you do nothing? The weeds will overwhealm it, the rabbits will eat it, the plants will sag, and at best you get some mediocre production out of the garden. But for just a few minutes a day, you can get a huge return back in the quality and quantity of food that your garden produces.

It’s the same thing with a website.

Sure if you put it up, it’s gonna maybe get you some stuff. People might find it, come in to your restaurant. But you’re going to have the same reaction to the garden. That it’s not really doing much for you. It’s not wowing you. Yet you’re doing nothing.

You don’t need to spend hours and hours every day on it. You just need a little bit of time. Post a blog, post a picture, tweet your specials for the day, post something on your Facebook page. if someone responds, or asks a question, check in regularly to respond to them and help them out. Heck even running contests, using game mechanics, writing an email newsletter and doing email marketing, none of that will eat up your day, but if you do it and do it regularly, by the end of the growing season, your website will be like your garden, and business will be blooming….

…er… booming…

To find out more about how we can help your restaurant’s website bloom, sign up for a free trial, or contact us today!

Instead I had a text message saying “we’re in the back outside” so I walked up the steps, and saw a hall to the right of the bar. Walking through it I entered a dining area, empty but nicer, more of a feel, and a door to the outside. Outside my friends waved to me. A huge outdoor patio area. Covered awnings with vines, gorgeous old wood tables, another bar. We ended up having fabulous food, in an amazing environment.

And you wouldn’t know it from the front.

Same thing for your website. You’ve gotta grab people. Your website needs to be that back patio, because otherwise someone is gonna glance at you, and then look at the next restaurant… unless they have a friend’s assurance to walk through the sketchy part…

Show your character on your website. It should represent you. Someone should go to your website and know what you’re about. Maybe you’re the outdoor patio restaurant. Maybe you’re a family pizzeria with no seats. Maybe you’re donut shop that loves sugar. Whatever you are, someone needs to get that, in their gut, when they go to your website. If they do, they’re far more likely to want to come check you out in person.

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And speaking of that, we’re offering some pretty crazy deals for June. The summer heat got to us or something. I don’t know what it is, but for June only our base price has dropped to $149 a month for a new sign up. Not only that, we’re waiving the 12 month commitment if you sign up in June. And you can do a 2 week free trial.

That’s only $1788 spread across a whole year. But if you pay up front all of it? We’ll give you an ADDITIONAL 10% off. $1610 for the year.

For that you get a custom designed website that shows your character, within a content management system that YOU control. We host it, support it, keep it secure and updated, we can even manage your emails and more.  In addition you’ll get a detailed online marketing plan so that you can actually learn to USE your website to improve your restaurant’s online marketing, rather than just let it sit there.

So take advantage while our brains are still cooking in the early summer heat. Get started on your free trial today or Contact Us With Questions. Check it out for 2 weeks with no commitment, and then if you like it it’s just $149 a month after that, with no commitment, or $1610 for the year.

Seriously if you’re looking to improve your restaurant’s website, now is the time to get started! Sign up today, before the deal goes away!

We’ve built numerous nutrition builders before. Sometimes they’re pretty intense things. Like with Boloco’s Nutrition Builder for instance.

Not only can you select what you want to eat, but you can add and remove specific items. Want that Memphis BBQ Burrito, but you want to add Chow Mein Noodles for some reason? bBam. There’s your nutrition facts as if you were reading it right off the back of a package.

Other times there’s less radical features. You just pick something. Like with Finagle a Bagel and their nutrition information pages we built. They’re straight up informative.

You select what you want to see the information of, and then it shows you a standardized Nutrition Facts for that item.

It’s static, but it gets the information out there…

Or it could be like bgood and their nutrition information and take a departure from the standard Nutrition Facts box and script to give the information THEY want, in the manner THEY want.

These are all different ways of displaying nutritional information, and they’re obviously not the only ones. With the new FDA regulations coming into play it makes sense for every restaurant to make sure that their basic nutritional and caloric information is available on their website.

But how would YOU want to present it?

Minimal and alongside the item within the menu itself with simple information listed on each menu item for calories or whatever? On it’s own page like one of the above? What sorts of information would you want to present? What sorts of controls would you want to have?

We’re curious as to your thoughts and what you’d like to see in our new version, as it’s going to be made available to not only all our customers, but to the public at large (again as mentioned…for the public at large for a price), and we’d love to get your ideas. Comment on this post, or drop us a line with your idea by contacting us today.

Over 500 million people are on Facebook now. In the US that number is nearly 50% of the population, and they’re people who are connected through social media, and use it to share their thoughts, what they’re doing, and most importantly for restaurants where they are eating. Word of mouth has always been of vital importance to restaurants to get business, and today that word of mouth is online, and much of it takes place on Facebook itself.

What can your restaurant do to help capture your market better, to connect with your customers, to increase loyalty, and improve your business?

We’re going to be talking about that today with our friends over at Must Have Menus on their own Facebook page with a chat at 1pm on their wall. I invite everyone interested in finding out more about how you can improve your restaurant’s Facebook page, and use it to improve your business to join us there, and ask questions which I’ll answer live on the wall.

You can find out more about the chat today at 1pm here on Must Have Menu’s blog, as well as go right to their Facebook page by clicking here. We look forward to answering your questions.

By this point you’re doing alot. For content marketing you are blogging about your restaurant on a regular schedule, hopefully a couple times a week, or more if you’re capable. You’ve got an editorial calendar you’re sticking to, and if you cant’ stick to it, then you need to edit your calendar so you can. It’s important to be consistent.

You’re sharing your specials on a daily basis as well, and posting your specials and blogs to your social media accounts, on Facebook, Twitter, posting your specials on Yelp, etc. You’re also being social, interacting with people who might ask you questions on any of the accounts, and responding to reviews on Yelp, both positive and negative, with a good friendly attitude.

As far as emails go, you’re running a scheduled email marketing campaign via constant contact. You’re sending out a drip email regularly on a schedule you’ve determined, maybe weekly, maybe monthly, with additional seasonal or special emails for special events. You’re also building this list by promoting it in your store, on your Facebook wall with a signup page there, on your website, and on twitter. You might even be employing some of our Game Mechanics tricks to get people to sign up even more.

On top of all of this you’re tracking everything in Google Analytics, and Webmaster Tools. You’re watching the open rates of your emails, the responses to your specials, and seeing what works, and what doesn’t. Seeing if tweeting at 10am or 11am or 5pm makes a difference in the results you get of people asking for those specials, and the like. You’re recording these and using them to tweak your editorial calendar, social media engagement, and email marketing plans in order to best reach your customers.

And just think a few months ago you were doing none of that. But now onto week 11.

Week 11

This week we’ll add in two things. One is so go into your email lists and start breaking them into segments. The other is Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.

Email Segmentation - Within Constant Contact you can create a number of different lists. For a restaurant these could be things like “Specials Information” or “Events” or “New Menu Items”. If you have live music you could have “Live Music Information” and be specific about that aspect. “Special Beer Lists”. You name it. Now you can start breaking your email contacts into specific ways they’d like to be contacted. You can still send emails to everyone, and should, but you can also target specific lists. People will be able to adjust which lists they want to subscribe to, and then you can send targeted emails to those lists, rather than generic emails to everyone.  Once you do this you can start segmenting and sending even more, but targeted emails. If people only want to hear about live music you offer, you can just send that information out separately. If they want to know about specials you can do that. You can send your regular email post out and encourage people to subscribe to specific lists, and when new people sign up they’ll have to select one or more of those lists. This will let you not only send better targeted information to your customers, but it will prevent you from spamming people not interested in specific information.

Pay Per Click (PPC) - Now in addition to Google Analytics, and Webmaster Tools you’ll link in your Google Adwords account. It’s very likely you’ve already been mailed a free coupon by Google to post ads. You can use this coupon to budget for your first month or two of advertising. Setting up Google Adwords can be confusing, and deserves it’s own post, but you’ll want to set up ads based on the keywords you’ve been collecting in Webmaster Tools for how people are finding your website. “Vietnamese Food Baltimore” or whatever those keywords are for your restaurant, you can set up ads to show up for those keyword results, and set up the amount to pay for people to click through. This will help you appear high up and on the first page of search results for people looking for those keywords, and won’t cost all that much money, particularly with a coupon. It’s good to set up a number of ads for the keywords important to your restaurant, and keep low budgets running on them every month. They work, and will help people who haven’t heard of you specifically through word of mouth, to be directed to your restaurant, then hopefully if you have a good website acting as your online word of mouth, into your location itself. A 10 cent click through cost to get someone into your location is a much better deal than any Groupon.

That’s it for this week, and it’s not a little. The Google Adwords itself can easily bog people down. That’s what we’re here for though. As part of oRestaurantDesign’s standard level of service we’ll help you set up your email lists and segmentation, and help you set up and figure out the optimum keywords for your Google Adwords. It’s how we help provide value to restaurants. We don’t just build you a website, we help you with all the little things, that can bog people down and confuse them on how to do them right, and work with our customers on a regular basis to ensure they’re as successful as possible on the web. If you’re interested in learning more, contact us today.

“Knowledge of Literature – nil
Knowledge of Philosophy – nil
Knowledge of Astronomy – nil
Knowledge of Politics – Feeble
Knowledge of Botany – Variable. Well up in belladonna, opium and poisons generally. Knows nothing of practical gardening.
Knowledge of Geology – Practical, but limited. Tells at a glance different soils from each other. After walks, has show me splashes upon his trousers, and told me by their colour and consistence in what part of London he received them.
Knowledge of Chemistry – Profound.
Knowledge of Anatomy – Accurate, but unsystematic.
Knowledge of Sensational Literature – Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century.
Plays the violin well.
Is an expert singlestick player, boxer and swordsman.
Has a good practical knowledge of British law.”
- from ‘A Study In Scarlet’, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Most people have heard of Sherlock Holmes, maybe you’ve seen the movie, or even read the books. Most people however have this vision of Sherlock Holmes knowing everything, about… well everything. And then using that knowledge, oftentimes obscure, to solve crimes. The truth in the stories however, is that he didn’t even know that the Earth revolved around the Sun. It just wasn’t important to him. It didn’t help him solve crimes.

Everyone does this. Everyone takes certain segments of knowledge or information, and just tunes it out. It doesn’t matter to them, they’ll never have the time or need to both gain the information, or use it, so they tune it out. Most people are like this with say their cars. How many people can even accurately describe how a generic internal combustion engine would work, much less be able to build one from scratch, or even give their car something simple like an oil change? It’s just not necessary information for most people to have. You hire someone who IS an expert to fix that car, and you keep your brain focused on what YOU do best.

With restaurants it’s important to focus on what YOU do good. Your restaurant, your food, your image, your customer service, the decor, you name it. Hospitality already has so many balls in the air, that running a restaurant is not just a full time job, it’s your life. You don’t have time to learn everything, you sometimes need to delegate. If you have a Food Truck you shouldn’t be worried about how to fix the engine of that truck, you’d hire a mechanic to do that.

Same thing for your website.

How a website gets built, both the nitty gritty pieces, as well as how it’s put together to appeal to restaurant customers has many specifics. People like to think “oh it’s simple you just…” but that doesn’t then explain why there are just so many bad restaurant websites out there. Ones in Flash, or with pdf menus, or with no real way to find a phone number or address or directions. No pictures, no design, no feel or heart to the page. Those are sites built by non-experts.

Your restaurant website is more and more an important part of how you will reach your customers. Word of mouth is huge, and people hear about you and check out your website. Many people will simply not go to a restaurant with a bad website, no matter what word of mouth they’ve heard. They expect to be able to check you out.

If Sherlock Holmes were alive today he’d know nothing about how to program a website, or how best to design one to reach new customers for his consulting detective work. To know how would simply be useless knowledge for him, where he could better spend his mental energy elsewhere. He’d hire experts.