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As you know, our top priority is quality craftsmanship in everything that we do.  That’s why we spend weeks, sometimes months, meticulously designing and thoroughly testing every website template we release.  Slate was no exception, and I must say it’s one of our finer works yetSlate features a beautiful homepage image slider with overlaid welcome text.  It also has a unique background texture, blocks of real slate actually, which can be changed to a smooth gradient, or no background texture (your choice).

As always, we’ve built in a vibrant selection of pre-designed color pallettes.  Plus you can tweak individual colors to make unlimited color combinations.

Slate comes packed with all of the features that come standard with every design template in our collection:

• Beautiful online menus
• Mobile website design built-in
• Reviews, Events, and Staff pages
• Photo galleries and Videos
• and much more…

If it’s been a while since you browsed our collection, now is a great time to take another look.  Be sure to check out the live demo of Slate to see this beauty in action.

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So…  What do you think of Slate?

By the way, we’re still offering website setup / migration service at no cost to you.  But that offer won’t be available for long, so be sure to take advantage of it while it’s still available!  Details here.

If your customers don’t use smartphones and don’t need to find your website when they’re on the go, then why bother making sure your website is mobile-ready?

However, if you’re in the Restaurant Business, then it’s a different story. Let me tell about something that happened to my wife and I, just last week:

Since we recently moved from New York City to Connecticut, we love to explore our new neighborhood looking for restaurants to try for the first time.

So last weekend, after some afternoon shopping we decided to look for a restaurant, but wanted to make sure we chose something good. My wife took out her iPhone and searched Yelp for “Italian Restaurant in Norwalk”. A few results showed up, but all had mixed reviews.

She wanted to get a better idea of the ambiance and food menu before coming in, so she tapped the link to view one of restaurant websites on her mobile browser.

Blank Screen.

A small message reads: “Your device doesn’t support Flash.”

Frustrated, she tapped back and tried viewing the website of one of the other restaurants that came up.

This restaurant’s website displayed on her mobile browser, but all of the text was extremely small and hard to read. We were walking in the rain so we didn’t have time to “zoom in” and cringe to read the website.

So we decided to play it safe. Rather than trying one of these restaurants, we decided to go somewhere we’ve been before.

Those restaurants lost us as potential new customers.

Make it Easy For Your Customers

If only those restaurants had mobile websites that were optimized for the smaller touch screen (and of course didn’t rely on Flash), we — and probably many other folks using their smartphones and iPads to look for restaurants — would have walked in and filled their tables.

A great mobile website design should do 3 things:

– It should display automatically, on ALL mobile devices.
– It should be easy to read, without having to “pinch” or “zoom”.
– It should load fast, especially on slow data connections.

If your restaurant mobile website does all of these things, you’ll be miles ahead of your competition, attracting more of those customers who are on the go.

At Restaurant Engine, we focus on making sure our client’s websites work great on mobile. Every one of our restaurant website templates has been meticulously optimized for mobile browsers.

Take a look at this video to see what I mean:

So let’s uncover this common pitfall, learn how to avoid it, and open up a steady stream of new customers for your restaurant, shall we?

The Pew Research Center released a study showing that people look to the web more than ANY other medium to decide which restaurant they’d like to go to. So we know having a web presence is important.

But finicky reviews on sites like Yelp and others don’t tell the whole story. Your customers need something more. A push to help them make that final decision whether or not to dine with you. And this is where that critical pitfall comes into play. 

When a potential customer finds you on Yelp, oftentimes they’ll click the link to your website. If the do, you’re in luck! Because this person just took a MAJOR step towards choosing your restaurant over the thousands of others they could have picked. BUT their decision is not made yet.

In order to convert this visitor to a customer, your website needs to convey Instant Credibility. How does it do this? A well-crafted, professional design is a great start. In fact, another recent study showed that 75% of website visitors judge a business’s credibility by their quality (or lack thereof) in design.

Here’s the bottom line: If your website design comes off appearing amateurish, slow to load, or doesn’t work at all, that visitor is gone. They’ll click the Back button in seconds, and move on to the next restaurant in the directory.

 OR…

Your restaurant website design could convey elegance, trust, attention to detail, and thoughtful craftsmanship. It could give this visitor EXACTLY what they want — a look at your food menu (not a PDF!), a glance through a few photos of your restaurant’s decor, and your contact info — quickly and easily.

This is all this visitor needs to make their final decision and say “Yes, this place looks great. I’ll book a table before they fill up.”

How We Get There…

Here are a few ways we design websites for our Restaurant clients that turn visitors into customers week after week, month after month.

First, we work with the best designers in the industry.

These guys (and gals) normally charge thousands for a custom website design. Our website design templates give you access to their amazing talent and craftsmanship at a price point that makes sense for small business.

Next, we optimize for the best viewing experience possible.

Every website we create is coded look great (and work great too) across every major web browser. We also optimize for search engine optimization (SEO) and mobile too (more on this later).

Finally, we design for restaurants.

These aren’t generic templates that apply to ALL industries. We made these specifically for RESTAURANTS like yours to attract more customers from the web. From showcasing food menus, to carefully placed contact info, we designed our sites with you — restaurant businesses — in mind.

Watch this quick video to see some of our work:

With Restaurant Engine, you can customize your website and make it your own.  It’s easy to take our restaurant website templates and transform them to fit your restaurant’s brand, style and personality.

Here are 5 ways you can customize your website template with Restaurant Engine:

1.  Add your restaurant logo to the top of your website

We’ll start off with something basic, yet very important.  If your restaurant has a logo designed, you can upload that logo image and display it at the top of your website.  Here’s a quick screencast showing how easy it is to do that in Restaurant Engine:

2.  Customizing Colors

Changing the colors of your website can drastically change the look and feel of your restaurant’s website.  The custom color options in Restaurant Engine give you tremendous flexibility here.

Watch this quick video to see the color options in action:

3. Tweaking Fonts

Another way to effect the “tone” of how your message is received on your website is the choice of font, or web typography as we web designers call it

We carefully selected the typography used in our restaurant website templates.  Each template comes with (at least) two font options:  One serif and one sans-serif choice.

For example, here’s the difference, as shown in the Primo template:

Sans Serif

Serif

4. Adding Photos

Photos are incredibly important for a restaurant website.  They give 1st-time visitors a sense of the ambiance and decor of your restaurant, just from looking at your website.

Adding photos to your site is easy, plus you can arrange them however you want.  Here’s a quick video demonstrating how you can create a photo slideshow on your restaurant website homepage:

5. Rearranging Layout & Widgets

Widgets allow you to add small areas of content to your website and arrange them however you want.  Restaurant Engine provides you with a number of custom widgets, like a Yelp widget, Tweets widget, location Google map widget, contact info, store hours… Just to name a few.

Here’s a quick video showing how some of these widgets can be arranged on the homepage:

Bonus! Advanced Customization with CSS

For those of you who know a thing or two about web design and CSS, you customize your site even further by adding your own CSS customizations.  This would allow you to override any style in the website template.

Custom CSS

Today’s spotlight is on Primo, the early favorite among Restaurant Engine customers. The Primo website template is one fine looking design. This bold and lively look and feel is sure to entice visitors to dig in for more.

Designed by Vancouver-based designer, Eduardo de La Rocque, we’re proud to offer our customers this premium design template.

Like all of our templates, Primo comes with 8 built-in, pre-design color schemes. They provide a good range of moods. For instance, the sweet and tangy, “Honey BBQ” color palette could work great for a sports bar or family grill restaurant. Or the “Vintage” color palette, which might work well for a traditional Italian restaurant website. Then there’s the “Crest” color palette… Suddenly I’m in the mood for sea food

Of course, if you can go ahead and tweak individual colors to your heart’s content.

The Primo website template comes packed with design details that draw interest. Like the double-line headers found at the top of all widgets. And the subtle background textures, shifting between brushed textures and a solid line pattern.

Every section of this template comes with unique bells and whistles, like the Reviews page, showing speech bubbles for your curated restaurant reviews.

What do you think?

What are your impressions of the Primo Restaurant Website Template? I’d love to hear what you think…