If you’re in the restaurant business, you probably have very little experience of building a website.  Don’t worry!  Using WordPress it’s so simple, you can make a restaurant website in 15 minutes.  Here’s how in 7 simple steps:

1.  Decide on a Hosting Company for Your Restaurant Website

The first thing you need to do is choose a company to host your website.  This can cost from as little as $6.95 per month.  Just make sure that you select a good quality company you can trust to guarantee the reliability of your service.  The last thing you want is your website going offline as your customers try to find you.  This article has plenty of guidance on Which Web Host to Choose.

2.  Register Your Restaurant Website Domain Name

Next you’ll need to select a domain name, which is basically the address of your website.  When it comes to restaurants, it’s probably best to use the name of your restaurant as your website address.  For example, if your restaurant was called Sizzler Steak House you could create the domain name: http://www.sizzlersteakhouse.com.   

You just need to check whether your chosen domain is still available, and this domain name checker will do this for you.  Then all you need to do is register your name, which your hosting company should be able to do.

3.  Download your Free Restaurant Website Builder

The most difficult stage of learning to make a restaurant website in 15 minutes is now complete.  Now comes the fun part… designing and building your website.

The next step is to download your free website builder.  WordPress is the ideal platform for creating your restaurant website and is extremely easy to use, customize to suit your needs and best of all, it’s completely free.  Millions of people are using it worldwide to create websites that look like they’re built by professionals.  As soon as you’ve downloaded WordPress, you now have your blank website template to begin customizing to suit your needs.

4.  Choose a Restaurant Theme

The really great thing about WordPress is that there are hundreds of free and premium themes available, which you can use to create the look, style and layout of your website.  All the program writing and complicated tasks are done for you.  Simply download your favorite theme to your WordPress website builder.  For more guidance on how to do this, this article tells you How to Install a WordPress Theme.

There are many different restaurant themes to choose from.  Here are three of the best, all of which are available to download through our WordPress themes page:

1. Food Plates:  this free theme is ideal for any restaurant or café, with a simple and professional style that will let the images of your food do the talking.  Fully widget ready, it comes with RSS feed buttons to spread the word about your great food, as well as pages in the header and a left side bar.
2. Be a Gourmet:  for a more fun and upbeat tone, this free WordPress restaurant theme comes with a search box, Recent Posts, Recent Comments and Welcome Text in the sidebar, social bookmarking buttons and sidebars on the left and right. 
3. Delicious: this is a premium restaurant theme, ideal for any kind of food establishment.  Although it costs $69 for a single license, $149 for multiple use, it’s worth the spend because it comes with four developed widgets, custom fields for images and four different page templates.  Ideal for a restaurant website with a blog attached. 

5.  Upload A Gallery of Delicious Food Photos to Your Website

The saying goes that people eat with their eyes, so it’s vital to place some good quality photos of your delicious food on your website.  You should also include some photos of the dining and bar area, to show people the style and ambiance of the place.

To really make your photos stand out and tantalize the taste buds, a slideshow is a good idea.  Featured Content Gallery is a really great plugin that creates an automated, fully rotating slideshow you can customize to place on any page, including the front page. 

Simply download the plugin from our resources page, go to the admin section of your WordPress site (which is http://yourdomainname.wp-admin), click on the plugin section where you can install new plugins.  Once downloaded you’ll see the Featured Content Gallery on your dashboard, which you can customize to suit your needs.  For more ideas on how to add slideshows to your new restaurant website, this article has plenty of ideas.

6.  Add a Table Booking Plugin

There are so many plugins you can use to add booking calendars and online reservation to your new website.  To save you time, so that you can make a website for your restaurant in under 15 minutes we’ve selected one of the most popular with caterers worldwide.  The WebReserv Embedded Booking Calendar provides your customers with the facility to easily check availability and reserve a table online.  As soon as they’ve made a reservation they will receive a confirmation email, which you will also receive so that you can make the reservation.  Upfront payment can also be secured. 

7.  Spreading the Word About Your Great Food

If you are planning to make a restaurant website in just 15 minutes, you’ll still have time to do a bit of online promotion.  One of the easiest ways to spread the word about your fabulous dining experience is using social bookmarking websites, such as Facebook and Twitter. 

The first step to social promotion is to get your customers to spread the word for you.  By adding the Sociable plugin, your website visitors can easily share news about your great food with all their social bookmarking friends.  A simple icon is placed at the end of each page, post and photo, so that visitors can easily share the content with their friends.  This is ideal if you have a special offer running with discount coupons, which your customers can help you promote through social bookmarking sites. 

So in just 15 minutes you have been able to make a top class restaurant website that gives your customers the ability to find you online, see photos of your great food, place an online order, pay in advance and tell all their friends about the wonderful experience they had!

Restaurant websites tend to have really high conversion rates, with one in 10 website visitors converting into a booking.  The internet is also the most common method of searching for a new place to eat, wherever you are in the world.  So it’s vital you create a website that makes it easy for your customers to reserve a table and order their food without having to pick up the telephone. 

Here are 5 of the best restaurant plug ins for booking and ordering online:

1. WebReserv Embedded Booking Calendar: this plug in allows you to create a website where customers can easily check availability and make a reservation online.  Whether you own a restaurant, hotel, guest house, spa or car hire business, this is an extremely functional bookings plug in.  Whenever a customer makes a new booking, an email is sent directly to the administrator.  A confirmation email is also sent directly to your customer to let them know their table has been secured.  You can also take upfront payment and customers can use discount codes.  Another version of this plug in is the WebReserv Sidebar Booking Calendar, which works in the same way but instead adds an online calendar and reservation handling onto your sidebar. 
2. Checkfront Booking Plug In:  Checkfront is a popular online booking calendar and reservation software that can be easily integrated into your WordPress website using this plug in.  It allows you to process payments, take reservations and display availability within your website.  If you already have a Checkfront account this is an ideal update to your restaurant website.
3. Booking Calendar:   another favorite for people wanting to create a website offering reservations online.  Customers can easily check availability and view any upcoming special events you are holding and reserve a place.  Perhaps your restaurant has theme nights or tasting sessions for loyal customers and this feature is perfect for generating bookings.  There is also integrated PayPal support so that your customers can make a payment upfront.
4. WP-Reservation:  this plug in has been designed to give you greater control over the booking and reservation process.  Ideal for restaurants, hotels and guest houses alike, it allows your customers to easily and quickly make a booking online.  They can also review what they have reserved, make a pre-payment and even make a customized order online.  This gives you the dual function of reserving a table and allowing your customers to make and pay for a pre-order.
5. MealClick:  this isn’t actually a plug in but an online food ordering system that you can use to complement your existing website.  Although it does come at a premium price (a flat fee yearly subscription of $975.00), it provides a complete online ordering management system.  The really good thing about it compared to other ordering systems available is that you are not charged per transaction, just a one off yearly fee. Then you know where you stand and what you’ll have to pay.  Customers have a number of features that really enhance their experience, including the ability to save their menus and favorites, ask for delivery or pre-order and pay for a meal at the restaurant.  You can also arrange different methods for the orders to be sent to you, including fax and email, so it’s not absolutely essential to have a computer onsite.  If you’re serious about creating an online ordering this is a system worth checking out. 

Finally, don’t forget that a key advantage of allowing your customers to reserve online is that you’re also creating an email database of loyal customers.  You can then send them email promotions, discount codes and news of your latest menu.  This is ideal for spreading the word about your restaurant and creating a loyal group of fans.  

For more advice on how to create a website for your restaurant, go to this article about WordPress for Restaurants and How to Create a Website that Sells Your Menu.

It’s quick and simple to create a restaurant website using WordPress, but you need to have a professional looking site that sells your menu and is simple for your customers to navigate.  The free website builder program will give you a great start, but you then need to customize your site to suit your culinary needs.  So we’ve put together some of the best restaurant themes, useful plug ins and secrets of creating a successful restaurant website.  This will help you to tantalize your customers’ taste buds before they even arrive through your doors!

Restaurant Themes

Once you’ve downloaded your free website builder and installed WordPress, you’re ready to start customizing your site.  There are several themes ideal for restaurants, which are easy to install and give you a professional finish.  Here are three of the best, which are available to download through our WordPress themes page:

1. Restaurant Theme: this theme is great for creating a professional online presence for your restaurant.  The front page is easy to customize and the entire theme is so simple to manage.  You don’t need to write a single piece of code.  The price is $65 for one site or $99 for multiple sites for several restaurants.
2. Gourmet: an out of the box theme for cafes and restaurants, you have multiple menu pages, a directions map and easy to customize front page. The price is $65 for one site, $99 for multiple sites.
3. Delicious: this is an elegant restaurant theme, ideal for any kind of food establishment.  Only released late 2009 it costs $69 for a single license, $149 for multiple use.  It’s worth the spend because it comes with four developed widgets, custom fields for images and four different page templates.  Ideal for a restaurant with a blog attached. 

Essential Restaurant Plug Ins to Add to Your Free Website Builder

When it comes to creating a restaurant website you need to make it vibrant, colorful, professional and project the kind of image your restaurant needs.  Yet you also need to make it user-friendly so that your customers can easily access your menus, book a table and keep up to date on your latest offers and new culinary creations. Here are three essential plug ins to add to your free website builder program.  These are ideal for any restaurant website and are free to download from our resources page:

1. Booking Calendar: a great plug in to give customers the option to make an online booking.  They can check availability and then reserve a table quickly and easily. 
2. NextGEN Gallery: tantalize your potential customers with plenty of images of your delicious food.  Using this plug in you can create a Flash slideshow, or a gallery of top quality images to complement your menus.
3. Sociable: once you’ve created your restaurant website you need to spread the word and get people to visit you online and book a table.  Tapping into the traffic on social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, is one of the best ways to create a buzz about your restaurant.  Word of mouth can be a powerful publicity tool in the catering trade, so get people talking about you online.  This plug in makes it easy by placing an icon at the end of each post, page or photo.  Visitors can then easily tell their friends all about your restaurant on their favorite social networking sites.    

You are finally ready to launch your website! Now all you need to do is pick a website design—but which one? With so many free website builder designs online, how will you know which one is right for you?

Well, we’ve done the work for you and scoured the internet for the 5 best website builder designs around. Check these out!

Free Website Builder Designs

In our opinion, WordPress themes provide you with the most options when it comes to website designs. There are literally thousands to choose from, in all colors, motifs, and moods that match up with any personal or small business website you have in mind. All the themes below can be found at  WordPress Themes Resource Page:

eProduct Theme

This is a theme for a business with a vision. If you’ve got digital products you want to showcase, then this theme is a must-have to get your message across. The large product image, clear buttons, and functional text make this edgy theme work. The light blue/dark blue combination is attractive and subtle. Your product will stand out and market itself with the eProduct theme.

Academy Theme

This theme is a winner amongst educational institutions and when you browse the theme, you’ll see why. The classic dark blue, maroon, and white colors of the theme speak traditional and reliable, and with ample room for pictures, your place of education and the students that make it shine will get a place in the spotlight.

Consultant Theme

This is a theme that allows for flexibility and creativity. It’s ideal for a consultant or professional whose main goal is to market themselves and their services. There’s room in this theme to show off your personality, skills, work experience, and of course, your services offered. There are five different color schemes available for this clean, crisp design.

Retromania

If you’re looking for something a bit more fun, then you may want to consider a design like Retromania. This site screams Americana with its faded out stars and stripes in the background and iconic display of 1960s media items.

Mini

Here is a theme for the minimalists among us. It’s simple, with clear, straight lines, and no unnecessary bells and whistles. It gets to the point of what you have to offer—your content—and allows for no focus on anything else, except of course for the occasional picture here and there.

About the author: Melanie Citron is a freelance author who wants the web to be open to everyone. She regularly researches and writes about great free or low cost resources to help all have a great presence on the web. See more of her writing at BuildMySiteforFree.com.