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Any restaurant without a website is in danger of missing out on hundreds of potential customers.  It’s true that they say, “we eat with our eyes,” and having a top quality website where customers can look at your menu, see pictures of your food and then make a booking is essential for true success.  Not only could you dramatically boost your takings you could also create customer loyalty, by keeping them up to date on your specials, unique offers and new dishes on the 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.