Food and drink
Someone is hungry, holding a phone, and choosing between you and one other place. They want the menu, your hours, and where you are. Almost every restaurant site I have looked at around here makes at least one of those three harder than it needs to be.
Where they are when they find you
On a phone, deciding now, often searching for a dish rather than a restaurant name.
01
This is the big one, and it is nearly universal. A menu posted as an image means customers pinch and zoom to read it — and Google cannot read a single dish. Search for "eggs benedict near me" and a restaurant whose menu is a picture simply does not exist, because as far as a search engine is concerned those dishes are not on the site.
02
Food photography is the point, so the pictures are big. Unresized, a homepage can run to three or four megabytes — fine on the wifi in your office, close to twenty seconds on cell data. That is a long time to be hungry and undecided.
03
Closed Mondays, different on holidays, kitchen shuts before the bar. If the site and the Google listing disagree, people believe Google — so the two need to match, and the site needs to say it plainly.
04
The delivery platforms are worth it for discovery and expensive for regulars. A direct option on your own site, for the people who already know you, keeps that margin.
What gets built
Every site is designed from a blank page for the business it belongs to. These are the things that come up on nearly every restaurants project.
Also
Private practice
They found you on Psychology Today or through a referral, they are reading on a phone, probably late at night, and they are looking for a reason to stop looking.
Trades and home services
On a phone, often outdoors, often in a hurry, frequently searching something like "plumber near me" rather than your business name.
Clubs and nonprofits
Someone deciding whether to come to an event, join, or donate — and quite often a member checking what time Thursday’s meeting starts.
Half an hour, free, no pitch. Tell me what your business does and what is wrong with the site you have — and if the answer is that it is fine, I will tell you that.