How and why we built a fully featured restaurant page - including marketing and conversion tracking

About me

I am a software developer with a huge sales background. This is one of my biggest assets. I can explain technical aspects of a project in a very understandable fashion and I know when to keep things simple to help the client make a tech decision. This is one of the reasons the people I work with have fun working with and for me. Everybody has realistic expectations and we're all for open communication.

The problem I wanted to solve

The challenge we were facing was a restaurant that had the reputation of being a golf club house and not the high-quality restaurant that they actually are. More importantly, a huge portion of the daily work should be corporate and private events and weddings - so part of the revenue that the restaurant can plan ahead with to offer continuously great service.

So. What did we build?

We built a website that has a few hidden tracking-features. The combination of things makes this project so very beautiful. Sales work mainly through pictures and emotional content - to make people fall in love with the location and just look for a date that's free. We built specific landing pages for marketing campaigns that allow tracking. We even replace the phone-number for people who found the site through one of the campaigns by a particular tracking number to make our work and its success visible and measurable to the client.

Tech stack

We built the site on the base of MODX, a highly customizable CMS that allows us to add custom snippets of PHP code to hot-replace form values, e-mail addresses and phone numbers to easily track the people who have been acquired through our campaign and those who came through organic search or direct traffic. We created an AdWords campaign that focusses on the areas around the restaurant and not on the ones that already know about the place. Furthermore we created a Facebook campaign that targets women who recently changed their relationship status from single (or something similar) to engaged.

We also picked MODX because we can easily implement lists and custom content (like a restaurant menu) without having the customer work with an HTML table or something equally complex. They just add list items by mouse-clicking "add dish" and it will appear in the responsive restaurant menu site that we built for them.

Same goes for every single content and news page that they set up.

The process. A quick step-by-step of what we did.

The foundation of every well-performing website is a simple and intuitive structure. Everything has to be where it belongs. We defined the structure at first and then decided what kind of perspective the site is going to have. What does it need, what is necessary for a first draft, what's a "nice to have" and what's a "must have in the future"?

The CMS decision has been made before we even started because there is nothing easier than a managing console that can be customized entirely to the clients needs. So MODX it was and the restaurant has been using this system ever since.

After setting up forms and global variables (the ones we swap out for campaigns) we did our finalizing steps. We refactored javascript and concatenated/minified the CSS, prioritized critical CSS for faster pageload times and loaded the rest of the CSS code asynchronously, which makes the site also a beauty on mobile devices.

Results can be seen here.

After testing the tracking functionality, we finally set up the campaigns that point to the site.

Challenges I faced

We've done this before several times, so there weren't too many challenges. With today's tools (PageSpeed Insights, Google's Keyword Planner, MODX, ...) pretty much everything that a site needs can be planned in advance and performed accordingly.

The only real challenge every agency faces is what the client eventually does with the site. This was the only thing that needed some coaching. The client knew how everything worked, they were not using their site content correctly. But after all, that is not their job - it's ours. So we showed them how to write simple pages, news articles and promote their product in a way that customers can relate to and today they're doing exactly that.

Key learnings

We learned that working with good restaurants involves a lot of great meals and red wine throughout the process, especially if the project turns out to be a huge success. Selling weddings is fun and so is selling events. Offering the customer a form that just requests a quote over a booking functionality allows the owner of the restaurant to cherry-pick the customers that they want to have. Sometimes, less automation is better for the client.

Tips and advice

• if you work with restaurants and hotels, you have to be flexible. Make appointments after 10pm, otherwise they will not be able to focus on the issues at hand.
• use pen and paper, avoid involving them in project management tools like Asana. We of course use this internally, but show them that you're one of them.
• stick to your word. Name a price for your product, don't add extra hours. If it costs you extra hours, that's on you. Always remember: the service industry are multipliers that will gain you a lot of loyal clients. Restaurant owners like to talk and they like to show what they have to others.
• never underestimate website development. This is not simply done by frankensteining together a wordpress site. With all the performance tweaks and tracking features that we implemented, this would have taken at least twice as long with one of those build-a-bear CMSs.

Final thoughts

It's fun to work in the service industry such as restaurants because it's an easy product to sell and the target audience is pretty much everybody. More importantly, the sales process is simple: If they have a great product, such as a great location and amazing food, it pretty much sells itself unless you mess it up entirely. Focus on pagespeed, pictures and add soemthing extra like a campaign, if the owners are open for that.

Through all those different channels, the site already sold the client every single Saturday in 2018 by September of 2017. A lot of dates in 2019 are also already booked. So this literally pays for itself.

So always be nice and fair to restaurant owners. You'll gain a life-long client who will have nothing but praise for your work.

p.s.: First post on codementor. Hence all the edits