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While most restaurants now seem to at least understand the importance of having an online presence, many of their websites leave a lot to be desired. 

Common problems include Flash overkill, difficulty finding menus and prices, and out of date offers and information. 

Here are 10 suggestions how restaurants both large and small can improve their online presence... 

Add clear contact details

One thing many customers will visit a restaurant website for is to find the phone number for bookings and enquiries. Don't make people search too hard for it. 

In fact, why not display it clearly on every page? This website has the contact number and email address at the top of every page where it can't be missed.

Show menus in text format

Too many restaurant websites display menus as PDFs, which just means that it takes customers longer to find, while making it very difficult for mobile users to view them. 

Some are presented in even odder ways, such as Flash-based menus which are impossible to scroll, illegible to read, and cannot be viewed on most mobile devices.

Add ratings and reviews to your site

Customers love the reassurance of reading reviews, and a couple of favourable reviews will help them decide to make a reservation. Ratings, reviews and awards are all applicable.

If you haven't had any reviews in the local or national press, then there's always the option of adding user ratings from local food listing sites.

If reviews can be shown in full, or a link provided to where the article can be viewed, this will be more convincing than extracting favourable quotes and displaying them out of context.

Provide quality photos

We eat with our eyes before our mouths. Customers like to get a feel of a restaurant, so a gallery showing the layout of the dining room and a scattering of the dishes on offer can be very persuasive. Also, quality food photography can stimulate visitors' taste buds and push them towards a booking. 

Let customers book online

If people have arrived at your website to check out your menus, then they are clearly considering a visit, so why not catch them there and then by allowing them to book a table online. 

This feature is not the preserve of larger or chain restaurants, as there are plenty of third party booking services available which can provide this functionality for small businesses. 

We recommend Dimmi's bookings which we can easily integrate into the website we build for you at no charge. This is a great service that is easy to use and at this point in time offers the service at no startup cost - I quote "This means that restaurants don't pay a cent until Dimmi puts bums on your seats & cash in your pockets".

Optimise for local search

If people are searching for somewhere to eat in your area, is your restaurant's website turning up in the search results? Try a few searches related to your locality to see where you sit on Google. 

There are plenty of ways restaurants can improve their rankings for local searches; optimising related keywords, adding your business to Google Maps, and making sure you are listed on local sites like True Local and Yellow pages, which generally rank well in Google. With Creative Cats web design & development packages, this is done for you.

Make sure mobile users can view your site 

Thanks to smartphone usage, the numbers of potential customers searching for somewhere to eat on their mobiles while out and about is growing. If your restaurant is ranking well in local searches, and has an accessible website, this can provide a clear advantage over competitors. 

It is probably too much to expect every small restaurant to have a mobile optimised site, but by designing a simple website, avoiding the use of Flash, and following some of the other tips here, then you can attract mobile internet users. 

There are also plenty of apps and mobile sites which can direct mobile searchers to your restaurant. In such instances, the user's next course of action is usually to look at the website of the restaurant they find on the listing to get a gauge if the place matches up to their dining requirements.

Make use of social media

I'm seeing more restaurants advertising their Facebook and Twitter profiles, and it makes sense to use these sites to promote your restaurants. Smaller businesses may find it harder to build a following but by using the personal touch and keeping people informed about new dishes on the menu, special offers etc, it can be effective. 

At Creative Cats we can help you set up your social media profiles and we also link your website to your social media outlets at no additional cost. After building your site we will also offer ideas and advise as to how to drive visitors to your site and how to engage customers with your social networking channels.

Avoid flash overkill

Restaurants seemingly love Flash for their websites, and there are plenty of examples of this. Setting aside accessibility issues for a moment, it can be great for presenting photography of the food or restaurant, but there are plenty that go too far.

Common examples of such sites are those where you need to click enter, then it plays a whole bulk of animation or a pop up window opens, and it also starts playing music which cannot be turned off or where the user would need to frantically look for the sound on/off button in order to turn it off ASAP.

It may well be very clever and stylish, but it's a usability nightmare. Apart from the irritating ticking noise which can't be turned off, the menu options keep moving which makes it hard to click on anything, and the text is way too small. Actually viewing the menu and finding out more about the restaurant takes real effort. 

Customers want information fast and they want to be able to easily access it. They don't want long loading times and drawn out introductions, they don't want to have to download files just to view the menu, worse of all they don't want the frustration of trying to find or access information which they can't get to due to the poor usability of a flash site!

Photography can still be beautifully presented without using flash so there is really no reason to go down that road.

Keep it up to date

Running a website as well as a restaurant can be time-consuming, but it's vital that restaurateurs keep their online content as up to date as possible. 

Quite simply, if information is clearly out of date, then many visitors will simply assume that it has closed. 

Reviews should be as recent as possible, otherwise customers won't take any notice, while it's not a good idea to show an old menu in case customers are disappointed when they arrive to fine a completely different one. 

If this is too much for you to manage on your own, at Creative Cats we are able to help you with this.

Content adapted from Graham Charlton, Editor at Econsultancy.