Hardly anyone reads a restaurant site. They open it on a phone with two other places in other tabs, and they want three answers fast: are you open, what do you serve, and what does it cost. We hand-code sites that answer all three on the first screen, and text back the calls nobody can get to during service.
They want one page to do three unrelated jobs. The one that pays the most is the one most restaurant sites bury the deepest.
Tonight
Someone in a car or on a couch, an hour from hungry, weighing you against two places with better photos. They will spend under a minute on your site, and they are looking for a reason to stop looking.
What they need to see
Planning
A birthday for fourteen, a rehearsal dinner, a Tuesday lunch for an office of thirty. This is the highest ticket a restaurant site touches, and the one that most often dies in a form nobody checks for two days.
What they need to see
Regular
They are checking whether you open on Labor Day, or whether the special came back, or they want what they ordered last Thursday. The cheapest customer you will ever get, and the easiest one to lose to a stale hours listing.
What they need to see
Open your own site on your phone, outside, on cell data, standing roughly where a customer would stand. Most of what goes wrong is visible in thirty seconds.
A PDF opens in a separate viewer, loads slowly, and arrives on a phone at about the size of a postage stamp. Search engines read very little of it, so not one of your dishes can bring anybody in. The menu belongs on the page as words, in sections, with the prices beside them.
Leaving them off is meant to feel upscale. What it does is send a first-time guest to a delivery app to find out what you charge, and those numbers are marked up over yours. Put your own prices where the food is and let people decide on real information.
Two sources of hours will contradict each other eventually, and the day it happens is a holiday. One place owns them, they show on every page, and they match your Google profile exactly. A locked door after a forty minute drive becomes a review you will be reading for years.
If you take orders through Toast, Square, Clover or Olo, or reservations through OpenTable or Resy, the site hands people to it. We do not build ordering, we never touch your payments, and we will not put a second system between you and money that already works.
This is the one kind of site we build where pictures do the selling, so our usual advice about skipping them does not apply here. Phone shots of real plates on your real tables beat any stock library, and they beat a dim photo of an empty dining room at 3 p.m. too.
Plenty of good Tampa restaurants sit inside a plaza, behind another building, or on a road where the turn arrives fast. Name the cross street, say where the parking is, mention the entrance that is not obvious, and put a map link right beside it.
Every hand is carrying something, so it goes to voicemail. Missed-call text-back replies in the same minute, learns that it is a party of fourteen, and holds the request until someone can actually talk.
An example for a restaurant. You write what goes out during service and after close, you pick whether it sends the reservation link or the catering form, and you say whose phone the big parties reach.
Hand-coded, no page builder and no theme, light enough to open in a parking lot. The page list comes out of the first call, because a counter-service bakery and a sit-down room with a private dining space are not selling the same thing.
The Website, or under the immersive build
Add-ons, on our site or the one you have
Same three builds and the same published prices whatever the business is. Food margins are thin, so here is the honest read on where each one earns its money back.
The site is decent and the menu is current, but a holiday menu, a wine dinner or a second location needs its own page to send people to. Keep what you have, add the page, and add text-back if the phone rings unanswered every Friday night.
One room, walk-in trade, no catering to speak of. You want a site you own that shows the menu properly and hands people to the ordering system you already pay for, and a Google profile with the hours, menu and photos it has been missing.
People come for the night as much as the food, so the site has to sell the room first: the light, the bar, the table by the window, on film, with the menu and the reservation button one tap away.
Every build is hand-coded, looked after for $97 a month, and yours to keep. The automation add-ons are $47 a month each or $197 for all five, on any site. Everything each build includes.
Whichever build you choose, menu and price changes are the small edits the $97 a month covers: send them over and they go up. The files are yours too, so you or anyone you hire can edit the menu yourselves. We build the menu as one plain section of the site specifically so this stays cheap, whoever ends up doing it.
No, and be wary of anyone who offers to. You are almost certainly already paying for Toast, Square, Clover or a delivery platform that handles payments, tickets and the kitchen printer. We link to it. Rebuilding that costs real money and leaves you with two systems that disagree about what a burger costs.
If the room is full every service, don't. The argument for one is that your hours, your menu and your catering pitch currently live on platforms you neither own nor can export, and the “Add website” field on your Google profile is the only spot that sends an interested person somewhere you control. If a profile gets suspended or an app changes its rules, you want a somewhere to exist.
No, and treat a yes as a warning. Food searches are decided mostly in the map results and the reviews, and how close the searcher happens to be standing is a big part of it and outside anyone's control. What we do is the part that answers to effort: the pages, the profile, the structured data and a steady flow of recent reviews.
Usually, yes. We do not shoot photography, so we will tell you exactly what to take and in what light, or point you at a local food photographer if there is budget for one. Then we size and compress whatever you send. A dozen honest phone pictures of plates going out during a real service will outperform anything bought from a stock library.
Yes, and in a lot of Tampa rooms it should be. That means a real second version written by a person, at its own address inside the site so it can be found and shared, not a translate widget that mangles the name of every dish. Tell us which language your room actually runs in and we build around that.
Only the people who handed over a number and agreed to hear from you, and every message has to let them stop. No bought lists, no working through the reservation book. That list gets built honestly, from catering customers, large parties, pickup orders and a signup on the site, which is slower and is the only version that does not put you at risk.
Also on this site: websites for HVAC companies, websites for med spas, websites for plumbers, websites for real estate agents. We build for dental and medical offices, law firms, salons, gyms and local shops the same way; book a call and ask about yours.
For the search side of a restaurant, with the profile, the text menu and catering pages, see restaurant SEO in Tampa. The method behind every trade is on two pages of its own: web design in Tampa and local SEO in Tampa, each with the prices.
Send us the menu, your hours and a few pictures of the room. On the call we tell you plainly where covers are slipping away right now, and which build would stop it.
Serving Tampa, St. Petersburg, Clearwater, Brandon and the surrounding Bay area.