People do not read a cafe's website to be persuaded. They read it to check four things: are you open, where exactly are you, what does the room look like, and can I sit and work here for two hours.
Coffee is roughly the same everywhere within a few streets. What differs is the room: whether it is quiet, whether it has a table big enough for a laptop, whether a stroller fits, whether it is the kind of place to take someone or the kind of place to be alone in.
That means the photographs should be of the space, taken from inside it at eye level, not of a flat white from above. The latte art picture is on every cafe website in the country and it tells a visitor nothing they did not assume.
$199 once, $15 a month, address from $35 a year in your name. The page is built in about a minute and you decide afterwards whether you want it.
Most ways of getting a website end with you renting one. Cancel a builder subscription and the pages stop existing; there is nothing to take with you because there was never a file. That is the trade you make for the monthly price, and plenty of people make it knowingly.
This is not that. What gets built for you is a WordPress theme: a real folder of files, with its own style.css, index.php and functions.php, that installs through Appearance, Themes, Add New, Upload Theme on any WordPress host in the world. We host it for you at $15 a month so you never have to think about it, and the web address is registered in your name, not ours.
If you ever want to leave, ask for a copy and it is yours: the theme file, the address, the content. You can hand it to any developer and they will recognise exactly what they are looking at, because it is an ordinary WordPress theme and not a proprietary export nobody else can open.
A food business example. A cafe build leads with the room and the hours. Nothing here is a mock-up: the frame below is a live page, rendered by the same code that builds a customer's site.
Free to look at the finished site. You pay when you want it live.
Addresses cost different amounts by ending: a .com is cheaper than a .io. We charge what the registrar charges us plus a small margin, and show the exact figure before you pay.
A Google Business Profile is the more important of the two for a cafe and you should absolutely have one. It is not enough on its own: it cannot carry your story, your photographs at any size, or a menu, and you do not control what it shows.
The site takes enquiries by email and shows your phone number. It does not run a table booking system. If you use one already, link to it from the page.
Yes, as text on the page, which is readable on a phone and findable in a search. Prices are yours to change whenever you like.
Same day. The build is about a minute; the wait afterwards is a new web address starting to work everywhere, which is usually a few hours.
Free to look, and nothing to cancel if you decide against it.
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