Running a restaurant requires you to be knowledgeable about so many things all at once: property ownership, team leading, accounting, cuisine, health codes, marketing and so much more. One of those unexpected skills that many business owners don’t consider right off the bat is website design. You may not have to know exactly how to build a website, but you do have to think very hard about how you want your site to look and feel. These days, about 70% of websites are currently running on WordPress. That’s because WordPress makes it incredibly easy to design, build, and run a website. If you’re not very familiar with how to start, here is how to choose a WordPress theme for your Restaurant website.
- Find a theme that is very intuitive. The number one thing that will make or break the success of your website is its intuitiveness. An intuitive website is one that doesn’t require a lot of thinking in order to navigate. If you are using a theme that is intended for another purpose, such as an online magazine, then the people who are trying to navigate your website are going to be thrown off. That’s why you want to take a look at the websites of several other restaurants that you admire and see what does and doesn’t work for each of them. Once you get an idea of the do’s and don’t’s you will have a jumping off point for finding the best WordPress restaurant themes.
- Decide what kinds of options you want. Once you have a general idea of what you want your website to look like, you want to start thinking about what you want your website to do. Some themes will enable you to display large, high-resolution images in a slideshow. If you want people to have a highly immersive experience with images of your restaurant and some of your top-selling dishes, then you want to find a theme that allows you to create expansive slideshows that occupy the entire screen. There are many other options that you might want to have, and once you know what they are, you can start exploring all of the themes in depth to see what they do and don’t allow you to do.
- Choose colors that work with your branding. Just about every theme that you look at will give you several different choices in color palettes. Some of them will even let you custom program your color palette. No matter what you choose, you want to make sure that you can match the websites color palette with that of your actual restaurant. Failing to maintain consistency with your branding can really hurt your business. If people look on your website and see one thing, then go into your restaurant and see another, they will not have a clear idea of the personality your brand is trying to project – and branding is definitely all about personality. So be sure that all of your colors, fonts and the overall vibe of your actual restaurant is captured in your website acutely.