For restaurants
The menu changed on Tuesday. The website should have changed on Tuesday.
A site built around the three things a hungry person actually wants: what you are serving, whether you are open, and the number to ring. You keep it right yourself, in a minute, from your phone.
Free while you build it. Nothing to pay until it is live on your own address.
The menu is the site
Change a price without ringing anybody.
On most restaurant websites the menu is a photograph of a piece of paper, or a PDF from two summers ago. Here it is a list you edit. Change eighteen to twenty, mark the sea bass off for tonight, add the special you decided on at four o'clock.
- Type it, say it, or ask for itClick the price and change it. Or say what you want changed out loud, which is easier when your hands are covered in flour.
- It goes back if you get it wrongEvery version of the site is kept. If you delete the wrong dish at the wrong moment, put it back.
Small plates
- Burrata, blood orange, pistachio9.50
- Grilled sardines, salsa verdeOff tonight8.00
- Beef shin croquettesChanged just now8.50
- Charred hispi, anchovy butter7.00
The first ten seconds
Somebody is standing outside at seven o'clock with a phone in their hand.
They are not reading your story. They want four things, and if the site makes them hunt for any of them they will walk to the place next door.
Are you open?
Opening hours sit on the page as text you edit, not as an image. When the bank holiday changes them, you change them.
Where are you?
The address and a map, on the page and in the footer, so nobody has to open a second tab to find the door.
What is on?
The menu, in full, as a page of its own — not a download that opens sideways on a phone.
What is the number?
The phone number where a thumb lands, near the top, not buried at the bottom of a contact page.
How the menu is held
Dishes are a list, not words buried in a page.
Each dish is a row with a name, a description, a price and a photograph. The menu page, the specials on the front page and anywhere else a dish appears all read from that one list. Change the row and every one of them changes.
Star the ones you want first
Mark a dish as featured and it moves to the front of the list, which is how the highlights on your home page are chosen.
Wine list, set menu, Sunday lunch
Each is its own list and its own page. Adding one does not mean rebuilding the site around it.
Written once, correct everywhere
No more finding out that the old price is still live on a page you had forgotten about.
Being straight with you
Two things this will not do.
It is not a till
Nobody pays for anything on the site. If you sell vouchers or take deposits, keep doing that where you do it now.
It does not run your bookings
If you take tables through a service, the site sends people to it. Your covers, your diary and your no-show policy stay exactly where they are.
The party of twelve in December
The enquiries worth money do not come through the booking widget.
Christmas parties, private hire, a wake, a supplier who wants to talk. Those arrive as a message, and messages get lost.
It reaches you two ways
Every enquiry is emailed to you and kept in the site's own inbox. If nobody has set an address, it goes to whoever owns the account, so it works from the first day.
The form is part of the site
There is no second service to sign up for, no code to paste in, and no monthly bill for the form itself.
Nobody is counting
Enquiries are not metered and not charged for. December is just December.
What it costs
Free until it is live. Then $20 a month.
Build it, look at it, change your mind about it — none of that is billed. The charge starts when the site is published on your own web address, and stops when it is not.
The $20 includes the hosting and the certificate that puts the padlock in the address bar. Your domain stays registered to the restaurant, at your own registrar.
The sensible questions
Asked by people who run kitchens.
How long does changing a price actually take?
About as long as it takes to type the new number. You open the dish, change the price and save it. There is no queue and nobody to email.
I do not have good photographs of the food.
You can start without them and add your own as you take them. Images can also be generated to fill a gap, and every live site comes with an allowance for that — but a real photograph of your own plate will always do more work than a made-up one.
We already have a site. Do we start again?
No. Give it the address of the site you have and the pages and words come across, then the design is rebuilt around them. You read what it found before anything is generated.
Can people book a table on it?
Not through us. If you take bookings somewhere already, the site links to it. We would rather say that plainly than let you find out after you have moved.
We have a second site down the road.
That is a second site, at another $20 a month. Both sit in the same account, and the same people can look after them.
What if the design is not right for us?
You get three complete versions from the same content — same dishes, same pages, different look. Ask for another set if none of them fits. A site can hold up to ten and you choose which one is live.
Your restaurant
Describe the place and see what comes back.
Ten minutes, no card, and you can throw it away if you hate it.
See how it works, step by step