Wine and Dine Your Visitors with WordPress.com

New Tools for Restaurateurs

Between starting the demi-glace and getting the case of chickens out of the walk-in for stock, the last thing we think you should be worrying about as a restaurateur is whether the guests showing up to your soft-open can actually find your phone number and location on your web site. Can phones do Flash yet? How long has that osso bucco been braising? We think the latter is probably a much better thing to take up your time, so we put together a few key tools to help get your mind off your website and where it belongs – on the food.

Introducing Confit

When looking at common restaurant site problems, one of the first issues that sprang to mind was how often broken animations, inaccessible information and bloated PDFs are foisted upon us when using our smartphones, when all we really need is a phone number and tappable address.

When designing Confit, a brand-new WordPress.com theme, we started with the mobile experience and expanded thoughtfully outward to larger content views like tablets and conventional web browsers which allowed us to focus on a seamless experience for all of your site’s visitors, no matter what device they’re on. No fuss, no muss.

Get in Touch

The next couple areas where we felt restaurant sites could use some help were mobile-accessible contact details and easy OpenTable reservations, both of which we’ve tackled by creating custom widgets.

The Contact Info widget includes an address field that automagically embeds a Google map, phone numbers that include tap-to-call for mobile users and your hours, right alongside your content in a conveniently simple sidebar.

If you are an OpenTable customer, just copy and paste your embed code from the Restaurant Center to embed a simple reservations widget right in your sidebar.

Focus on the Food

One thing we knew we couldn’t sacrifice in the name of accessibility was gorgeous photography, so we chose to feature it front and center with support for background images that scale up to even the highest of resolutions for hi-dpi displays to showcase those top-quality photos of your gastronomic creations. Each page can even have its own background photo if you’d like.

We think we’ve chosen some lovely typography to represent the humanity in the act of cooking food for others, but should you wish to change your fonts and colors, by all means check out our custom design upgrade.

Another first for WordPress.com users is the ability to manage your menu (not the website’s navigation, we mean your actual food menu) right within your Dashboard. Add as many food menus as you’d like and arrange your items into sections quickly and easily. You can even edit each menu item and add a featured image to display.

Already have your menu set up by a designer in a PDF? No problem, we’re ready for that, too. Simply upload your PDF and tell us which page you’d like to show the menu on, and you’re good to go.

Find out more about how to get your restaurant started with WordPress.com on the restaurants page, or check out the Confit demo site.

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