The Cost-Effective Way to Design and Manage Your Restaurant Website

There is no question about it; you need a website to advertise your restaurant.

However, if you’re like other restaurants, you are on a shoestring budget or just want to keep your finances under control.

The question, then, is this: How do you go about designing and managing your website in a cost-effective manner?

If you haven’t already looked into it yourself, designing and managing a website can cost up upwards of several thousand dollars.

Yes, investing in the design and management of your website is a wise business move; but truth-be-told, you don’t have to spend all that cash.

With a little know-how and some tricks up your sleeve, you can successfully design and upkeep an eye-catching website that will be sure to help drive the success of your restaurant.

Wondering how to save some cash on these aspects of your website?

Here are some super helpful pointers:

Pre-Designed Themes Or Templates

Pre-designed themes or templates are website designs that are created with specific industries and businesses in mind. Designers and design firms can create the theme and allow for customization instead of creating multiple custom websites.

The designers are still creating high quality designs and websites. They’re just doing it in a more effective way for businesses that don’t need or want a completely custom website. So the business gets the same website with the same functionality without the custom website cost, which can be several thousand dollars.

It’s a lower cost option for the designer and it’s a lower cost option for business owners too.

Customizing Pre-Designed Themes

When you hire a designer to create a custom theme for your website they’re going to do many of the same things you can do with a pre-designed theme.

With a pre-designed theme you can make it entirely your own by adding your logo, photos, menus and a custom color scheme.

There is nothing wrong with using a pre-designed theme; just make sure you add your own content (text, images, etc) to give it a unique look. (tweet this)

If you’re looking to take things a little further with your pre-designed theme you can have a designer create custom images or illustrations for your pre-designed theme. These images are usually not as expensive as an entire custom website and the illustrations aren’t required unless you really want to add some flair to your site.

Fresh Content

Another way you can keep your site custom is to add your own content and to make sure that content is fresh.

If you want to keep your site current, in the field of view of search engines and future visitors, and keep your current visitors happy, you’ll have to update it regularly. This includes adding new content on a constant basis (pictures of your food, new menu items, new events and happenings, etc). (tweet this)

Maintaining Your Site With A CMS

While it is super important to do, maintaining a website can be quite timely, or it can be quite costly. What is the best way to inexpensively and quickly update and maintain your restaurant’s website?

With a Content Management System (CMS).

A CMS allows you to quickly, easily and inexpensively maintain your website – and the best part is, you don’t need to have any knowledge of coding. So, you can write your text, add your images and organize them anyway that you want, creating a professional look with ease. All you have to do is log into your CMS, add what you want, hit ‘publish’ and your site is updated.

The perks of a CMS? It’s quick; it’s effective; it’s easy – and it’s inexpensive.

What’s The Best CMS?

At Restaurant Engine, we use WordPress, which is one of the most popular (arguably the most popular) CMS available today.

WordPress makes it very easy for people of all computer skill levels to make changes to the site.

If you’re an expert you can change a lot of things including code and things like that.

But if you’d rather leave the code alone and focus on things like images, menu items, etc. you can easily make changes using WordPress.

At Restaurant Engine, we provide WordPress for all of our users, but we don’t use the base WordPress. We have customized the CMS to be exactly what restaurant owners need to be able to manage their websites.

No more struggling with making changes on your site. You don’t have to pay programmers high dollars to make changes. You can quickly make updates yourself or have someone on your staff make them.

Either way, it’s more cost-effective than a custom design with a custom CMS.

A website will help to get more people talking about your restaurant, fill up more seats, boost your sales and your success.

With these tips, designing and keeping your restaurant’s website updated is not only easy; it’s also quite cost-effective.

What methods have you employed to design and maintain your website? We invite you to share your experiences.

Photos by Heather Cowper and Geoff Peters