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.