Restaurants website design in Los Angeles

Restaurants in Los Angeles: the local picture

Los Angeles is a design-led market. The entertainment, media and creative industries set a visual standard that spills into every other category, and a site that is technically sound but visually ordinary will struggle to win work here. For an offshore vendor that is the bar to clear — the assumption to overcome is that offshore means competent but generic.

The economy is more fragmented than New York's: entertainment and production, a large and growing technology presence on the Westside, aerospace and manufacturing, healthcare, and an enormous small-business base spread across a metro area big enough that "local" search behaves differently than it does in denser cities.

Practically, the time difference is the hardest of the US markets to work with — India is twelve and a half hours ahead of Pacific time, which makes the overlap window narrow and makes asynchronous working discipline more important than in any other Wave 4 city. Buyers here are comfortable with remote collaboration, and the pandemic normalised distributed teams thoroughly, but they will want to see that handoffs, reviews and approvals are handled without waiting a full day for each round trip. Showing the working process explicitly is worth more here than showing the portfolio.

We work with restaurants businesses across Los Angeles — from Santa Monica, Downtown LA, Beverly Hills, Culver City, Pasadena to Silver Lake.

• Website design & development in Santa Monica, Los Angeles
• Website design & development in Downtown LA, Los Angeles
• Website design & development in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles
• Website design & development in Culver City, Los Angeles
• Website design & development in Pasadena, Los Angeles
• Website design & development in Silver Lake, Los Angeles

What restaurants websites have to get right

The overwhelming majority of restaurant website traffic wants one of four things: the menu, the timings, the location, or a table. Everything else is decoration. The most common failure in this category is publishing the menu as a PDF or, worse, as an image — both are invisible to search and painful on a phone, and the menu is the single most-requested page on the site.

An HTML menu with real dish names and prices is what lets you rank for the dish searches that bring in new customers, and it is trivial to keep current compared to re-exporting a design file. Timings need to be accurate and to handle the exceptions — different weekend hours, kitchen close versus venue close, festival closures — because a customer who arrives at a closed restaurant leaves a review about it. Reservations should work in one flow without an account; if you use a third-party booking system, it still needs to not break the page on mobile. For anywhere that does delivery, the aggregator links belong high on the page, though it is worth making direct ordering at least as easy given what the aggregators take. Restaurant, Menu and OpeningHours structured data are what get you the rich result, and most competitors do not bother.

• Competing with aggregators for direct orders
• Keeping menus updated across outlets
• Driving repeat customers