I know what you are thinking. I have been promoting WordPress for building restaurant website or any website for a while. However, when it comes to cut cost, there must be other options. I built a free restaurant website example a while back to demonstrate how easy and fast you can get your site up running. Best of all, it’s free. Of course, the time you spend on building the site is NOT free.
You can read the post at – Build Restaurant Website for FREE! Now I am taking that to the next level by adding photo gallery, direction and review page. So I was doing a favor to a local business friend to build a quick website at very low cost to drive instant traffic to the site.
Redbrick Pizza Gilbert is a well established pizza restaurant in the USA. The store in Gilbert and Chandler wants a website in just matter of few days. So I helped them put together a single page restaurant web site at first. Now the site has grown to multiple pages.
As you can see the first page contains a huge 20% OFF coupon, which has been printed many times since the first day launched the site. There are also photo gallery page, direction and reviews page. The idea is not building the world most beautiful restaurant website, but a high conversion website. With the huge discount at front page, the printing rate dramatically increase.
One thing I did differently this time is to use Facebook comment box for reviews. The beauty is that other Fanpages can also post the comments on the page and instantly share the reviews with their fans.
The comment box also allows you to moderate the review before it goes public. However, it requires a little technical background to enable the comment moderation. Basically, you will need to add Facebook Open Graph Protocol on your blogger site and include two important piece of properties: admin_id and app_id.
Without these two properties, you won’t be able to moderate the comments. Believe me, there will people posting garbage or spam comment on our comment box.
You can find out more about adding Facebook open graph and enable social search on your website from the two Facebook Fanpage Secrets blog posts on the right sidebar.
Of course, you can also add real Google Map reviews, Yelp Reviews or any reviews from other third part business directory websites. The idea is to share the reviews as quick as it’s published. With Facebook comment box, your page will be seen by many location relevant Facebook users.
The advantage of using blogger is that it gets indexed by Google almost instantly. If you build your site in the proper procedure, your site can be indexed in matter of 30 minutes. However, blogger is still not as flexible as WordPress. One other advantage of using blogger is that it allows you to post Javascript in the page content. Unlike WordPress, you will have to tweak the template to allow Javascript.
This isn’t what I am trying to do every day. It’s definitely a slowlane project. I can’t refuse to help desperate local business owners.
About Terence Chang