Restaurants website design in Vancouver

Restaurants in Vancouver: the local picture

Vancouver combines a technology and film-production economy with the highest property costs in Canada, which pushes local operating costs — and therefore local agency rates — well above the national average. That cost gap is the main commercial argument for offshore delivery here and one buyers reach on their own.

The technology sector is substantial, with a strong games and visual-effects presence alongside conventional software. Film and television production is significant enough to shape the creative labour market. There is also a large small-business economy and a strong environmental and outdoor-industry character that influences brand expectations — sustainability positioning is more commercially meaningful here than in most North American cities.

The Pacific Rim orientation matters: Vancouver has deep trade and population links across Asia, which makes working with an Asian vendor entirely routine and often actively preferred for its time-zone and language advantages. India is twelve and a half hours ahead of Pacific time. Canadian privacy law applies, with British Columbia's provincial legislation adding its own requirements for some organisations. Accessibility expectations are rising nationally, though the binding regime is less prescriptive than Ontario's AODA.

We work with restaurants businesses across Vancouver — from Downtown Vancouver, Gastown, Yaletown, Burnaby, Richmond to Surrey.

• Website design & development in Downtown Vancouver, Vancouver
• Website design & development in Gastown, Vancouver
• Website design & development in Yaletown, Vancouver
• Website design & development in Burnaby, Vancouver
• Website design & development in Richmond, Vancouver
• Website design & development in Surrey, Vancouver

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