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.

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!