
What makes a restaurant website great? If you are inviting people to have a gastronomic experience in a restaurant, your website should be able to excite your potential customers. While captivating potential customers with great images of food and ambiance, restaurant website designs should also allow for a seamless user experience. This means that on top of being beautiful, potential customers should be able to navigate with ease, get the information that they need, and do necessary transactions without having to deal with lengthy loading times, problematic layout, and code errors.
Tips on Making an Awesome Restaurant Website Design
Making a great restaurant website is similar to cooking like a pro – you need to know who would want to eat in your establishment and keep them coming back for more. When you think about it, design and food is all about psychology – people are driven to flock to anything that caters to their desires but is quick to turn away when they see something that doesn’t suit their tastes.
What makes a designer’s life easier than that of a chef’s is that design is universal in its appeal most of the time – aesthetics on the web can be applied to different sorts of audiences, which makes web designing an art that understands people.
What ingredients will make a tasty design for your restaurant’s site? Here are some things you should consider.
Use a Background Color that is Great for Reading
Many designers would use neutral colors on the background because they allow reading on a screen easier. If you want to use bright colors to get attention, use them sparingly and make them work in line with your identity.
Be Careful Where You Use Images
While there are numerous restaurant websites that make heavy use of photography, it doesn’t mean that they always work. Some users do not want to visit a video and image-heavy website because they tend to load slower or prevents them from seeing important details such as the food selection, operation hours, and restaurant location.
Images are great, but if they take your customers too long from reaching the information that would actually make a sale, reconsider where you place them.
Always Design for Multiple Devices
Most consumers look for food while on the go, which means that it is almost instant-revenue for you if you use restaurant website designs that work for smartphone and tablet users. With these consumers in mind, considering a minimalist design will allow your customers to navigate through your website easily.
On the lookout for restaurant website designs for inspiration? Here are some designs that can help you build a tasty website.
Tasty Websites Worth Checking Out
Il Buco
Il Buco’s website makes use of neutral colors in most of its white spaces, which does a good job when it comes on making customers focus on food images. The use of vertical and horizontal scrolls make the website extra interesting.
Green Rebel
Green Rebel uses outstanding restaurant website designs in marketing their brand. The recycled paper look juxtaposing with the vibrant color of fresh produce makes you feel that their products are deliciously organic.
Marlow’s Tavern
This website makes you crave for a Marlow’s Tavern special, without even knowing what it is. The bold use of fonts also makes you know that they are branding themselves as an all-American tavern, which quickly attracts their target market. You may also notice that this establishment has a strong sense of community as well.
Rivers Smokehouse
Not many restaurants use the color black, but those who do are usually brands that are most confident in being the best in their niche. The use of black and bold colors in the 4 Rivers Smokehouse sets an authoritative tone – it allows people to know that they are the experts in smoking.
BurgerIJ
BurgerIJ made use of the best restaurant website designs that are available to them – they have great photography that comes with a 360-degree view, awesome illustration, and button animations. All the elements in their design complement with each other and entices site visitors to pack their bags and book a flight to Europe, just like what cool kids do.
Lupa
One of the restaurant website designs that you can take advantage of is the use of seamless scroll effects that complement great photography in the background. This makes the website visitor stick on your website and devours every information that you dished out. Noticed the sticky Reservations button at the upper right portion of the website? That little detail drives instant sales.