A link page for a café or restaurant
A hungry visitor wants two things, and neither of them is your story. Everything else on the page is decoration until those two are settled.
The two things a hungry visitor wants
Someone opens a restaurant page for one of two reasons: to see what you serve, or to work out how to get it — the address, a table, delivery. That is the whole demand. The page earns its place by answering both on the first screen, and it fails by putting anything else there first.
The story, the chef, the interior photographs are all worth having and belong lower down. Nobody has ever chosen a restaurant because the founding year sat above the menu. Put the food and the way in at the top, and let the rest wait.
The menu is a link, not a download
A PDF menu is the most common mistake on a restaurant page. On a phone it downloads instead of opening, arrives as a heavy file, then renders as a page-sized image the reader has to pinch and drag around. Half the people give up before they have found the pasta.
A menu that lives as an ordinary web page opens instantly, wraps to the screen, and can be edited on the Tuesday the fish changes. If yours exists only as a PDF, that is the highest-value thing on this list to fix. Until it is fixed, put the price of a main course in the note line under the link, so the tap is at least informed.
Delivery services get their own rows
If three services deliver your food, that is three rows. A single link labelled "delivery" that leads to a page listing them is a hop nobody needs, and someone who already has one of those apps installed knows instantly which row is theirs. The name is the useful part: people are loyal to a delivery app, not to delivery.
Three similar rows look repetitive to you and obvious to them. If the list grows, a text heading above it — "Order in" — turns four links into one section a reader can take in or skip at a glance.
Hours, address and the map link
Opening hours belong on the page as text. A picture of the hours cannot be copied, cannot be read aloud by a screen reader, is illegible on a small screen, and quietly goes out of date because changing it means opening an image editor. A text block takes ten seconds to edit on the morning you close early.
Write the address out in full so it can be selected and pasted into whatever the visitor uses. A map link beside it covers the rest: we do not embed maps, and a plain row labelled with the street opens the app the person already has. Text plus link serves both the one walking and the one ordering a taxi.
Say the useful part, not just the street. "Entrance from the courtyard", "second floor, above the bakery" — a note line under the address saves the phone calls you take every Friday evening.
The seasonal offer, and the code on the door
A daily or seasonal item at the top of the page works because it is the only thing there that changes. Lunch until four, the new summer menu, a set for two on weekdays. It gives regulars a reason to open the page again instead of assuming they already know it.
When the season ends, hide the block rather than delete it. The wording, the image and the position all come back next year with one switch. An expired offer at the top does more damage than no offer at all, because it tells every visitor that nothing here is current.
A starting structure
If you are building the page today, this order suits most places, and you can rearrange it in a minute once you see what people actually ask you about.
- The menu — a link that opens as a page, with a note line saying what a main course costs.
- Order in — one row per delivery service, each with its own name visible.
- Book a table — the phone number or the form you already use, whichever gets answered.
- The address, written out in full, with a map link and the way in.
- Hours as text, including the day you are closed.
- Social rows, and the story about the place, below everything above.