Restaurant website design in Spokane, from $499

Nationally, restaurant sites are quoted anywhere from a few hundred dollars for a template to several thousand for an agency build. Ours start at $499 for up to 15 pages, which covers a single-location restaurant with menu pages, hours, photographs, a reservation link, a private dining page and a catering page. $999 covers 16 to 50 pages and $1,499 covers 51 or more. Online ordering that we have to build rather than link is quoted separately.

It depends far more on what is included than on the headline number. A freelancer typically quotes $2,000 to $8,000; an agency usually starts around $10,000. Spokane spans most of that range and a few agencies here publish figures, some starting below ours. What matters is whether structure, speed and SEO are part of the build or sold to you later, and whether you own the domain, the hosting and the files at the end. Ask any quote those two questions.

Building it yourself costs $15 to $50 a month for a website builder plus your own time, and a weekend will get something live. Paying someone costs from a few hundred dollars to five figures depending on who and how many pages. The honest way to compare is per page and per what it includes — ours start at $499 up to 15 pages, $999 for 16 to 50, and $1,499 for 51 or more, with the SEO structure and page speed part of the build rather than an upsell.

For a restaurant that wants to run its own menu and nothing else, Squarespace and Wix are genuinely fine and cheap. Toast and Square both offer restaurant-specific site builders that come free with the point of sale and handle ordering neatly, at the cost of your site living inside their system. WordPress is the flexible option and the one that survives changing your point of sale. If you enjoy doing it yourself, do it yourself — we would rather say that than sell you something you do not need.

One thing above all: the menu is readable on a phone in under ten seconds, as text, with prices. After that, today’s hours and the parking situation in plain words, an obvious single action for each kind of visitor, photographs of your own food, and pages of their own for happy hour, brunch, private dining and catering. Restaurant sites do not fail because they are ugly. They fail because they make somebody standing outside work too hard.

Usually not. A neglected blog with three posts from two years ago is worse than none. What does work for a restaurant is a page — not a post — for each thing people search: the happy hour, the brunch menu, the private dining room, the catering service. Those earn traffic permanently and never look stale. If you genuinely want to write, a seasonal menu note a few times a year beats a schedule you will abandon by March.

You can find what you came for without being taught the layout. It loads fast on a phone on a bad connection. The text is large enough to read without zooming and has enough contrast to be legible in daylight. There is one obvious next action per page. Nothing moves unless you asked it to. Most of the qualities that make a site good are qualities you do not notice, which is why design is hard to judge from a screenshot.

Who you are and what you sell, in the first screen. A way to get in touch that has been tested and actually works. Accurate hours and location if you have premises. Prices, or at least ranges. Pages structured with real headings so search engines can read them. Compressed images so it loads quickly. And clear ownership: the domain, the hosting and the files should be yours.

For a restaurant: the name, one line saying what kind of food and where, today’s hours, the address with a parking note, a link straight to the menu, and one obvious action — order, book, or call. Photographs of your own food, not stock. Everything else can wait until the second screen. The homepage is not a brochure; it is a signpost for someone deciding in the next thirty seconds.

You can trade without one, and plenty do. What you cannot do without one is keep the full ticket on a direct order, control what your menu looks like, or rank for the dishes you are known for. Marketplaces charge a commission on every order and show your customer three competitors on the way to your food. A site does not replace them — it gives the regulars somewhere better to go.