Restaurant, 60 covers
The menu loads before the table's sat down
A sixty-cover dining room near Bray, a menu nobody could read on a phone, and what we did about both.
The situation
A good dining room behind a difficult website
The restaurant had what a village on the Thames can't fake: a dining room with a view of the water, a loyal weekend crowd and a kitchen that cared about its menu. It also had a website that undersold all of it.
The menu was a PDF, exported from the file the printer used. On a phone it opened in a separate tab, crawled in on the weak signal you get at the bottom of a lane by the river, and had to be pinched and dragged sideways to read a single dish. Parts of it were flattened into pictures, so Google couldn't read them and neither could a screen reader. Nobody searching for a vegetarian main or a Sunday roast was going to land on it.
Booking came from a third-party reservations widget that lived at the foot of the contact page, three taps from the home page. The people who most want a table for Saturday night are the people least willing to hunt for the button.
Google was the third problem. The listing still carried winter opening hours in June, so the evening kitchen looked as though it closed earlier than it did. And because the review sites were tidier than the restaurant's own pages, a search for its name often sent people to a directory first and to the restaurant second.
What we did
Five jobs, none of them clever
Turned the menu into a page
The menu became a web page of real text, grouped the way the kitchen thinks about it, with allergen information beside the dishes and a short note on how often it changes. There is nothing in it to slow it down, so it loads on a poor signal, and it can be edited in minutes when the fish order changes. The Sunday and seasonal menus each got their own address, so people can share a link to the one they mean.
Moved booking to where the thumb already is
Booking sits in a bar that stays in view on every page, one tap from wherever someone happens to be. The restaurant already paid for a reservations provider, so we kept it and styled the page it opens to match the site. Private dining and larger tables have their own enquiry form, which asks for the date and the number of guests first.
Corrected the Google listing, then gave it a routine
Opening hours, special hours for bank holidays, the menu link, the booking link and the photographs were all brought up to date on the Business Profile. Then we agreed a short monthly routine with front of house, so seasonal changes get made before the season arrives instead of after the first confused phone call. On projects like this it is Hattie Clarke who sets that routine up, having spent five years running front of house for riverside restaurants.
Made the name search land on the restaurant
The page titles, descriptions and structured data now say plainly who the restaurant is, where it is, when it opens and what it serves, and a page about the village ties the restaurant to the place people already associate with it. None of this guarantees a position, but it gives Google very little reason to send the restaurant's own name to a directory.
Kept the old addresses working
The address of the old PDF menu now redirects to the new menu page, as does every other address that had been shared or linked, so nobody who bookmarked the restaurant arrived at an error.
What changed
Things a diner would notice
The menu is now a fast web page that updates in minutes, not a PDF.
Booking sits one tap from every page, and Google shows the right hours in every season.
Searches for the restaurant's name now land on its own site instead of a review site.
The fixes were ordinary ones. The menu, the hours and the booking button were right, and a routine kept them right when the season turned.
Keep reading
More on how this kind of project works
- The serviceVenue & hospitality websitesFor the restaurants, pubs and venues along the river
- The villageBrayHow search works around the river here, and who we work with nearby.
- The sectorWebsites for restaurants and pubs in the Thames ValleyMenus that load, tables that book
- From SoundingsWhat a riverside restaurant's website needs before Saturday serviceThe menu, the hours, the booking button and the Google listing: a practical checklist for restaurants and pubs that live on weekend trade.
About this study
This is an anonymised composite drawn from the kinds of restaurant projects the studio takes on, with the details changed and no client named. The work page explains how we handle that, and real case studies will replace this one as clients agree to be named.
Start a project
Tell us what the website needs to do
A short note is plenty. Tell us what you sell, where, and what isn't working, and you'll get a straight answer within a working day, even when the answer is that you don't need us.
