Restaurant WebMaster

The Restaurant Webmaster “Restaurant Directories” are an excellent way to get your restaurant noticed. When people are searching for a restaurant to visit they often turn to Internet search engines to find what they are looking for. Our Restaurant Directories respond well to all the search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN. etc) and people come to our sites every week looking for restaurants in your area.

We know that restaurants need to make the most of thier advertising budgets and we are currently offering some of the best restaurant advertising deals on the Internet. We have four different levels of involvement and one of these plans will surely fit in your budget.

1.) Highlighted Restaurant ($99 to $199 /year)

We have three spaces available on our directory site for “Highlighted Restaurants”. Our highlighted restaurants receive advertising coverage on one of our corner peel away ads. These ads are the most visited places on our websites. People are drawn to the ads because they want to see what is there.

The ads are located in the top right corner ($199/year as this is the most visited area on the site), top left corner ($149/year as the second most visited area on the site) and the bottom left corner ($99/year as the third most visited area of the site). As a highlighted restaurant you will see the most Internet traffic produced by the website. We will link directly to your existing website (if you do not have a restaurant website, we can develop and maintain one for you for as little as $199/year) as well as develop a tailored page for your restaurant on the directory. You will also receive all of the benefits of the Featured and Suggested restaurant categories as well.

2.) Featured Restaurant ($39/year)

As a “Featured Restaurant” your restaurant will be one of twelve restaurants that are placed on the scroller at the top of our restaurant directory sites.

We will link directly to your existing website (if you do not have a restaurant website, we can develop and maintain one for you for as little as $199/year) as well as develop a tailored page for your restaurant on the directory. You will also receive all of the benefits of the Suggested restaurant category as well.

3.) Suggested Restaurant ($19/year)

As a “Suggested restaurant” your restaurant will be listed with a hot link in the middle column of our directory site just below the Featured restaurants.

We will also give you a hot link to your existing restaurant website (if you do not have a restaurant website, we can develop and maintain one for you for as little as $199/year) on your free restaurant listing on the site. People are more likely to visit your site with a hot link then if they have to type in your url (website address).

4.) Free restaurant Listing

With your free “restaurant listing” on our directory you can send us articles about your restaurant which we will publish on the site. These articles can promote the activities and specials of your restaurant and will help to attract visitors to your existing website (if you do not have a restaurant website, we can develop and maintain one for you for as little as $199/year) and restaurant.

If you are ready to take advantage of one of these great offers for your restaurant, or if you have any questions, go to the Contact or call us at 305-304-6321.

At Restaurant Webmaster our hope is to be your Restaurant Webmaster online. We want to design and maintain your restaurant website for you so hat you can focus on your restaurant. We also want to provide information to any of you who are going to operate as your own restaurant webmaster. As we chronicle the development of some of the websites we work on, you can learn a lot about developing and maintaining your own website. Our newest project on Restaurant Webmaster is the Florida Keys Seafood site. The Florida Keys Seafood site will eventually be offering fresh Florida Keys seafood, including stone crab and lobster, straight from the boat to the consumer. We will be working to get the site to be responsive to the various search engines for people searching for fresh Florida Keys seafood.

We will be utilizing a series of blog articles about the behind the scenes activities of Florida Keys commercial fishing. These articles will chronicle the day to day activities of a working commercial fishing boat. By incorporating specific keywords into these articles we expect to be able to get the site to show up well on the search engine results. Once we get the site up in the results we will customize the site to include the seafood for sale pages. The ultimate idea is to be able to provide a fresh Florida Keys Seafood experience to people anywhere that UPS or Fed Ex deliver. The product will be caught as it is ordered and then shipped on dry ice to the recipient. Certain seafoods will only be available when they are in season (this includes stone crab and lobster).

On Restaurant Webmaster we will follow the progress of the site as it is being developed. So far in the process we went to Good News Domains and purchased the domain name “www.floridakeysseafood.com”. We have hosted the site with Good News Domains and have installed Wordpress. We loaded a custom theme onto the site and then created a logo to give the site a professional appearance. For detailed information on how to create a blog or website using WordPress we recommend that you visit My Newbie Blog (www.mynewbieblog.com) which provides step by step instructions on getting a blog or website started. As we continue the development of the site we will update this series of articles.

Here at Restaurant Webmaster we are continuing in our series of articles to help you develop your own restaurant website.  We have been developing a sample site called Coco’s Kitchen so thatyou can see the process in action.  We have referred you to a series of articles on My Newbie Blog that detail how to create a blog.  These articles will step you through the process of what you need to do to get a solid foundation established for your website.

We have just taken the Coco’s Kitchen site through that foundation laying process.  We added some plugins to help make the site function better.  We used the following plugins:

• WP-Backup - Creates regular backups of the site and emails them to our gmail account
• WP-Upgrade - Makes staying current with WordPress easy
• Statcounter - Helps us to see how much traffic the site is getting
• Akismet - Catches Spam
• All-in-one-SEO - Helps the search engines find the site
• Contact Form 7 - Adds a nice contact page

We also changed the permallink structure for our articles.  This is really important.  Your permalink structure needs to be /%postname%/.  If you haven’t already made the change do it now.  It will be important for the future SEO (search engine optimization) of your site.

We also added a header logo to the site.  A good logo can add a lot of credibility to your site.  We design our own logos at restaurant webmaster.  We added a simple logo to the Coco’s Kitchen site that reflects it Florida Keys location.  If you would like us to design a logo for you we can do it for $75.  Here is where the site stands now:

In our next articles we will begin to add the pages where we will eventually have menues, reviews, and articles.  We will also begin to add some pictures to give the site a more professional appearance.

On Restaurant Webmaster our goal is to make it possible for every restaurant to have a quality, well maintained, website. We provide a wide range of services to help with this process, but we will be teaching any of you who want to take on the role of restaurant webmaster for your restaurant how to start websites in this series of articles. We are firmly committed to the concepts of the Golden Rule and believe in helping people wherever we can. We will be developing a restaurant website for “Coco’s Kitchen” as we write these articles to help you see the process. You will be able to visit the website and see the progress.

Web Hosting

There are a couple of things you need to think through as you start a website. The first question will help us answer the second question. The first question to answer is, “Will I use one of the free blog services available, or will I have my website hosted?”. There are some excellent, easy to use programs available to create your website and you will never have to pay a dime (or a penny). They are absolutely free. My two favorites are Blogger.com and WordPress.com. (I have written an article about how to create sites using these programs in an article on My Newbie Blog site called “More on Starting Free Blogs“). For restaurants with no budget for Internet presence this is a great option.

If you are able, however, I would recommend you use a hosting service for your website. It will allow for a lot of options in the future that the free blogs won’t. You can have your website hosted for $50 - $80 dollars a year depending on how much space you might need and what web hosting company you use. I use GoodNewsDomains for my web hosting. They have reasonable rates and have always provided me with excellent technical support (technical support is another advantage of using a web host, the free blog services don’t have live tech support, you have to use their forums for help which can take a long time). Once you decide whether you will be using a free service or a web host we can move along to the second question.

The Domain Name

Once we decide our hosting question we need to turn our attention to our domain name (url address, the www.whatever.com, web address). If you use one of the free blog services they will work you through the domain name process. All of the domain names for those free sites include the free host name, for example, if you started a site for “yourrestaurant” on blogger.com the domain name would be www.yourrestaurant.blogspot.com (that is another drawback to the free sites, long domain names, but they are free). If you are using a web host you have more flexibility with your domain name. I suggest you use a domain name that best describes your restaurant. The domain name you choose will have an impact on search engine results in the future. You will want people to be able to find your restaurant website by searching for the name of your restaurant on Google. If you use a nickname, or initials, your restaurant website won’t show up on the search engines. If your restaurant is called Fargo Coffee Shop, you will want a domain name that is www.fargocoffeeshop.com Don’t try and shorten it to FCS.com as this will never show up on the search engines. It may be easier to remember but the only people who will ever find your site that way are people who already have the web address. You want people who are searching for restaurants in your area to be able to find your restaurant on Google. Once you decide what domain name you want, go to GoodNewsDomains and see if it is available. A domain name will cost you about $10 a year. (For a detailed description of how to get a domain name and a web host read an article I write called “Create a Blog You Can be Proud Of“.

Getting Started

For the rest of our articles in this series we will be setting up a hosted restaurant website for “Coco’s Kitchen”. We are setting this site up as a sub-domain to this main site. It allows us to set up the site for free and yet gives us the advantage of being a hosted site. We can do that because our main site, Restaurant Webmaster is a hosted site. That allows us to set up as many as 25 sub-domain sites for no extra charge. Since we are using this site as an example, this works best for our purposes. The rest of the articles will be written assuming you have a domain name and a web host.