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.

Entrepreneur.com Article on Restaurant Websites

If you are interested in getting an Internet presence established for your restaurant we can help you. Use the Contact page or call us at 305-304-6321 if we can help you in any way with your restaurant website.

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.

• A copy of your menu (breakfast, lunch, dinner, specials, take-out)
• Days open and Hours of operation
• Address and phone number
• A few of your favorite recipes
• Any reviews you might have of your restaurant
• A logo if you have one

If you were talking to someone about your restaurant, how would you answer the following questions?

• What is your restaurant like?
• What kind of food do you serve?
• What is the atmosphere like?
• Is your restaurant casual or formal?
• Do you need a reservation?

Would you like to start a blog for your restaurant?  This is a great way to help your website get traffic from the Internet.  You can write the occasional article (two or three times a month) and ask people that work for you or even your regular customers to write the occasional 200- 300 word article about your site.  If you are interested in a blog, we have a couple of different solutions bit of which are no extra charge.  One solution is that we we will start a free blogger.com blog for you and teach you how to use it.  The other option is that you email us your articles and we add them to your site.

We also need some pictures of your restaurant (inside, outside, food, staff, customers, etc).  If you have a digital camera and are comfortable with getting the pictures on to your computer and emailing them then do that.  If that is going to slow down the process, go to your local drug store and buy a disposal flash camera with 27 exposures.  Take the pictures and then return the camera to your 1 hour film developer.  Have them put the pictures on a CD.  The cameras will cost you about $5.  The CD will cost about $5.  This is often the quickest and most convenient way to get us pictures.

Our hope is to keep the process as simple as we can for you.  The thing that often slows the processs down is gathering the necessary information.  You should be able to run through this list in under an hour.  Do the best you can to get us the information quickly.  You can email us this information at restaurantwebmasteronline@gmail.com or mail it to us (Restaurant Webmaster, 100 County Road, Big Pine Key, FL 33043).  We look forward to being your restaurant webmaster online!  If you have any questions use the Contact page to let us know.

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.

This is the standard Kubrik theme that comes with WordPress. One of the nice things about WordPress is that there are a lot of available themes to change the way your website looks. Many themes are available for free. If you want to get fancy you can buy a premium theme for $50 - $150 dollars or you can even have a custom theme developed for $300 - $1000. We are going to use a theme from Solostream for this site, but you can find a lot of themes for free by doing a Google search for Restaurant WordPress Themes. Here is the theme we are going to develop for our example site:

This theme has a nice scrolling feature which I think will make a positive impression when people visit the site. You want a theme that will catch people’s attention, and yet you don’t want it to look to cluttered. We also want to get the most important information we want to convey right on our first page. People may not go any deeper into your site so we want to make sure the theme we choose allows us to get our main information right into people’s faces when they come to the site.

In order to develop your restaurant website with WordPress you are going to have to learn how to download and upload files. I want to encourage you to read a series of articles I wrote on how to create a blog at www.mynewbieblog.com. Go to the My Newbie Blog site and read the articles called 50 Things To Do to Start a Blog from Scratch - Parts 1,2, & 3. Once you read these the articles you will be familiar enough with the basics to continue setting up your restaurant website. My Newbie Blog is filled with useful information about most of the topics you will need to master in starting your own restaurant website. We will continue working on our example site in our next article in the series.

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.

On each of our directories we offer 12 local restaurants the opportunity to be a featured restaurant. All the restaurants in the area are listed, but the site primarily revolves around the 12 featured restaurants. You can be a featured restaurant on one of our directories in your area for $120/year. As a featured restaurant you will receive highlighted placement on the site, a page on the site for your restaurant information, and a link to your existing website if you have one. If we do not have a restaurant directory for your area, we will start one.

These restaurant directory sites have to show up on page 1 of a Google search to be effective. This takes time to happen and we are in the process of making all these sites search engine friendly. If you would like to see one of the directories in operation go to www.floridakeysrestaurantsonline.com or do a Google search for Florida Keys Restaurants.

Restaurant Webmaster Online Package: $ 310/year

This package is a great deal for busy restaurant owners/managers. We become your restaurant webmaster online. We get you an appropriate domain name, and set up and maintain your restaurant website for you. All you have to do is send us emails every week or two with your most current information and we do the rest. Your website will always be current and updated. We will also feature your restaurant on one of our restaurant directory sites (a $120/year value, if we don’t have a restaurant directory established in your area, we will start one).

Get Started Restaurant Website Value Package: $ 500

* Assistance in choosing a suitable domain name (a domain name will cost you $10/yr)
* Assistance with a hosting provider (hosting will cost $50-$80/yr)
* Complete set up of restaurant website
* Training on how to work with your website done via Skype or telephone (max 2 hours)
* Two years on one of our restaurant directories (a $240 value)
* Installation of free tracking software
* Free email support

Custom Restaurant Website Packages

We will work with you to custom design a website for your restaurant. You can tell us everything you would like to see on your restaurant website and we will provide you with a quote.

Use the contact page for information on any of our Restaurant Website Packages.

Restaurant Website Consultation: $ 200 for 2 Hours

Our Restaurant Website Consulting services can be anything you want them to be. How to add video to your site, how to add audio to your site, how to set up blogs, how to make your website search engine friendly, how to increase traffic to your website, technical help, restaurant website review and critique, etc. The minimum cost for this is $ 200. We can break the consultation services in to 2 – 1 hour sessions or 4 – 30 minute sessions.

Restaurant Website Rescue Package: starts at $ 50

If you hit the wall with your restaurant website and nothing seems to be working we can help you. We will connect by Skype or phone to analyze the situation. The minimum cost to you to fix things fast starts at $50. If the problem is more significant we will advise you of the final cost before we start, to allow you to budget.

If you would like to arrange for consulting or rescue use the contact form or the Skype button below: