A restaurant website that is not a PDF menu

Why the menu has to be text

A PDF menu fails three times over. It is unreadable on a phone without pinching, it is invisible to a search engine so nobody ever finds you by searching for the dish you are known for, and it is a file someone has to decide to download rather than something they simply see.

A menu written as text on the page loads instantly, reads at any size, and gets indexed. The practical consequence is that a person searching for the thing you do best can find you by it, which a PDF makes impossible.

The sections that matter for a restaurant

The menu, as text, with prices

It does not have to be every seasonal change. The core menu and honest price bands are what people are checking.

Hours per service

Lunch and dinner separately, and the days you do not open. Kitchen closing time is its own question.

How to book, in one obvious place

Phone number, or a link to whatever system you already use. Do not make someone hunt between the two.

Dietary and allergens

Vegetarian, vegan, gluten free, and who to speak to about a severe allergy. This decides where a group of six eats.

The room, at the time of day people come

Photographs of the dining room lit as it actually is in the evening, not empty at noon with the blinds up.

Parking, access, and private hire

Three short paragraphs that quietly answer most of the phone calls you take.

Cost

$199 to build, $15 a month to host, address from $35 a year registered to you. Free to look at before you decide.

What you actually end up owning

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.

How the build actually runs

You describe the business

The name, what you do, and anything a customer should know. One or two sentences is the whole brief. No sitemap, no wireframe, no discovery call.

The site is built and written

Design, words, layout and licensed photography chosen for your trade, composed into a finished page in about a minute. You see it before you spend anything.

You change what you want to

Click any line of text and type over it. Swap any photo for one of yours, which always looks better. Delete a section you do not want.

You pick the address and go live

Search for the address you want, we register it in your name, point it at the site, secure it with a certificate, and email you when it is live.