All Posts Tagged With: "website"

Restaurant Webmaster Article

January 19th, 2009 • admin • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

Restaurant Webmaster Online was recently involved in providing information for an article on Restaurant websites for Entrepreneur.com.  The article contains a lot of useful information that we recommend reading.  We will put a link to the article here:

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.

Florida Keys Seafood

December 3rd, 2008 • admin • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

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.

Restaurant Webmaster Directory/Website Information

October 27th, 2008 • admin • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

In order to develop the best directory page or website for you, we need the following information.

  • 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.

Starting a Restaurant Website - Part 2

October 24th, 2008 • admin • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

This Restaurant Webmaster series of articles is here to help you start your own restaurant website. In our first article we talked out the different options available for starting your blog. From this point forward we will assume that you have a domain name and a web host and are using WordPress as your site software. We are setting up a site called Coco’s Kitchen as an example site. The site looks like this:

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.

Starting a Restaurant Website - Part 1

October 24th, 2008 • admin • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

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.