Treat Your Website Like You Would Your Restaurant (If You Owned One)

07.20.09

Andrew Wetzler, President

What are some of the factors that impact whether a restaurant will be successful? I believe they include:

• Cleanliness
• Quality of food relative to the prices being charged
• Friendly and conscientious service
• Creativity
• Attention to detail
• PR/Marketing savvy

A high percentage of restaurants fail, particularly within their first year of business. I would wager that those that succeed have a better handle on the above bullet points than those that don’t make it. Anybody I have ever spoken with who is in the restaurant industry has shared with me that it’s a whole lot harder than they ever dreamed it would be.

If you give some thought to the websites you interact with and those you have a favorable opinion of, they likely have many of the same attributes as these restaurant criteria. For example:

• Cleanliness = Easy to read and intuitive navigation
• Quality = Providing customers with a strong value
• Friendliness = Reducing clicks to access info and including easy-to-find customer service
• Creativity = Using web 2.0 tools, without losing focus on the site’s objectives
• Attention to Detail = Avoiding spelling mistakes, dead links, etc
• PR/Marketing = It doesn’t matter how great your site is if nobody finds it

One of the best aspects of the web from a marketer’s perspective is the opportunity to carefully craft the perception of your business that a visitor encounters. Just like with a restaurant, it’s a challenge to attract customers and then achieve and maintain a favorable impression. With the web, at least the hours of operation are a bit easier to manage.

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