The Bare Essentials of a Catering Business Website

If you’re running a catering business, whether it’s an established one or one with which you’re just starting out, you simply have to have a website or else your catering business is as good as invisible. People go online before they do anything else these days, most likely using their mobile devices, a consideration of which brings to light one of the most important bare essentials of a catering business’s website.

Mobile-friendliness

So if someone is already looking to order their breakfast from you or they’re organising a event for which they require catering does so from their smartphone, as soon as they wake up, they have to be able to get a good user experience. Most users these days use their mobile phones for everything in any case, so your catering business website has to be mobile friendly.

Cross-device compatibility

Mobile-friendliness is not the be all and end all of the best of catering websites, but just a part of what it means for a site to be cross-device compatible. Yours definitely needs to be compatible across different devices, but what that really means is that it should look like the same site whether viewed on a smartphone, tablet PC, or full-sized laptop/desktop.

Web developers use a technical term referred to as “responsiveness” to describe cross-device compatibility, but fortunately in this day and age Content Management Systems which are usually integrated with catering business management platforms are inherently responsive in this way.

Recognisable brand presence

This merely builds on from cross-device compatibility, but the focus here falls squarely on your branding. Just honouring the graphic design principles around your logo and so-called “corporate” or brand colours is usually enough to ensure this. Otherwise the whole idea behind a website is to associate your brand with your offering, so the branding has to have a presence that complements any imagery or information presented in line with the offering.

If your logo is not in view, the colour scheme should give the viewer an idea of a natural association with your logo.

Clear and concise information

Often as the owners who commission something like a website we tend to focus on elements which users ultimately prove to be indifferent about. For instance, after viewing your site, you probably always scroll all the way back up to the top, to in a sense “leave things the way you found them!” The one thing you have to make sure of with your catering business website is that the relevant information is conveyed to the visitor and they can come away wiser about your products and services, or at the very least they know what to do next to get in touch or complete and order.

Loading speed is important as a result, part of which is contributed to by the simplicity of your site.

Interactive

Finally, your catering site is likely the first point of contact your customers will have with you, so it has to be interactive and effective in making them believe that any further contact with you will be just as pleasant.