With today’s booming foodie culture, restaurants have become design innovators with a sharp eye for visual appeal on the plate and the page. From inspiring seasonal menu organization to the cultivation of a relaxed, spirited atmosphere, the restaurant industry is embracing its role as cultural forerunner. This makes the food world an ideal source of inspiration for web designers craving something new.
If you’re ready to upgrade your web design, here are 3 tips that can lend your page some foodie flair and have your readers coming back for seconds.
1. Your Cornerstone Concept
If you’ve ever watched an episode of food TV or chatted up a restaurateur, the first question everyone asks is about the type of restaurant. “What’s your concept?”
The power of concept is that it extends through the type of cuisine to the larger feel of the restaurant, a blend of cooking and atmosphere. It takes into consideration factors like chef training, local resources, and innovation to build something unique. Chefs seek a concept that they can execute passionately and that diners will respond to.
Websites also need a core concept that will fuel the design. Your concept should emerge in response to the service or content you offer while staying close to factors that make a page easy to read and navigate, such as color, font, and spacing. You’ll know you’ve landed the perfect concept when form and function intertwine.
2. Fresh Comes First
No one wants to read a website that looks and sounds like it’s straight from the nineties. That’s why just like menus that emphasize a fresh, seasonal menu with no frozen products will attract more customers, websites with up to date content and a fresh feel will also see a higher readership.
One reason fresh web content is so important is that search engines pay more attention to sites that are regularly updated, registering that new content has appeared since they last trawled the page. What’s more, it’s hard to build client trust in your brand if you’re two years behind everyone else. The world’s moving fast, and you need to keep up.
3. The Photo Finish
Historically, a big part of what’s set apart high-end publications and poorly produced websites or cheap news rags is the quality of print and photography. Restaurants learned this lesson the hard way in the 1980s and 90s, featuring amateur photography that made food appear less than appealing. Today, however, food photography is highly polished with vibrant colors and attractive plating. It’s also typically taken by a trained food photographer.
If your website utilizes photography, consider the value of minimalism in graphic design. Cluttered photos draw attention away from the focus and demonstrate a lack of composition knowledge on the part of the photographer. If you’re not sure what that means, you should probably be working with a professional who can bring the experience and equipment necessary to do the job correctly.
By taking these 3 tips from the restaurant world to heart, your webpage can leave behind bland design concepts and add some spice, standing out from the packs of generic websites with no more visual interest than your local diner menu.
Suddenly you’ll be standing out, a top chef of the web world.
