Free Restaurant Website Example with Blogger

You may ask me what in the world does Terence has anything to do with building a restaurant web site?

Obviously, you don’t know me that much. In the past two years, I have been working very hard as sole Internet entrepreneur to help local businesses pay less and do more on the Internet. I have built many large scale web sites for corporations as well as for small local businesses.

With my search engine optimization knowledge at local sector, I’ve helped more local businesses getting on top of major search engines. Local search marketing has become one of my very strong skills on my resume even I left Corporate-America a long time ago.

Many local businesses, especially local restaurants, don’t have huge budget to pay for their own domain, web hosting and hire designer to do all the works. However, running local business without a web site is like sell a product without a brand and business card.

So I have been asked many times by some very small restaurants to show them how easy they can host their own restaurant websites without spending fortune. Yes. there are ways to do so. Using blogger.com’s free blog platform is FREE and easy. The idea is to start a web site a minimum cost. When the web site bring enough revenue, the business can decide to move on their own domain, and web hosting. In other words, I still prefer to host the web site on WordPress blog platform.

So I spend few hours to organize and put up a simple restaurant website example to make the points. This restaurant web site example is built to demonstrate the features and layout that can be used for any restaurants looking for easy web site building solutions.

Here is the Link. Free Restaurant Website Example on Blogger.

So do you get start building a FREE restaurant web site? There are few requirements need before getting start.

• Get a Google Gmail Account. I highly recommend to get a FREE Google Gmail account, which will be used to access all Google related services.
• Signup Blogger.com with your Gmail Account. Blogger.com is a Google operated blog platform. It’s FREE to everyone who wants to start a simple blog or web site.
• Signup Google Webmaster Tools with your Gmail Account, which is a Free services to register your newly opened blog to Google’s system. So Google Search Engine bots can easier identify your blog and crawl your site.
• Signup Google Picasa Web Album with your Gmail Account, which will host your restaurant photos, pictures for FREE. It will also allows you to create slide show as well.
• Signup YouTube and link to your Gmail Account, which will host your restaurant video tour and anything that you want to present to your visitors in Video. It’s also FREE.

This is all you need to get to start your free restaurant web site. We can talk about how to add Twitter, Facebook, Google Adsense, Third-party slide show, and many other widgets to your site in different post.

Structure your web site hierarchy. Recently, Blogger.com add new feature to allow user to create static page. This is a great new feature that will dramatically save time on organize the site. However, there is disadvantage with it.

Basically, we want to create few pages and many blog post. We will arrange them in the way to make the site look fresh, dynamic and also static at the same time. So search engines will like it.

Here are few pages we would like to create.

• About Us or Our Restaurant
• Menu
• Specials
• Testimonials
• Location

You will be asked to add the page widget on top of the page as part of navigation bar. On blogger, the home page is always dynamically show the latest blog posts. So we need to organize that in a way to show only two latest blog posts and organize them into different label. We will than add the label to the menu bar. Thus they will look organized.

We need at least 4 different categories.

• Latest News or News
• Appetizers
• Main Courses
• Sides

In my case, Appetizers, Main Courses and Sides will be used to show case the foods with pictures.

Let’s assume that you have all the pages and posts created, we will find the links of each labels and post as link under the linkbar. The limitation of Blogger will make it looks like a two line menu bar. We just have to live with it that way for now.

I will stop here due to limited time to put up the details steps. If you have question starting your FREE restaurant web site with blogger.com, contact me offline. I am more than happy to help you!