Archive for March, 2009

Back to the cool training advice, there is no excuse on not being able to provide a little bit of WOW by impressing your guests by opening a beer .  Opening a beer with a beer is good clean fun and great for impressing the barflys, but this is what makes you unique and will help get your customers coming back and asking for you. What is in it for you, easy You make more money.

Learn these tricks love them, and furthermore have fun the restaurant training series is about having fun at work, make more money, these are tricks a chain restaurant manager will never let you do, its an insurance liability, yep I used that one before too.

How Not To Open a Beer

Caio

Website Psychology

Your Web site is the Most important element in your online  restaurant marketing

Who am I?

campaign, No matter what we think or any body tells us about building an hospitality online business is that it can be broken down into two basic steps

Restaurant Website Psychology incorporates three areas of research. Color Psychology, Psychological Triggers and Psychological process. Using Psychology, restaurant sales are optimized, customer interaction and retention is enhanced, and return visits are increased. What exactly does all this mean? Lets take a look at the three parts of Website Psychology.

1. Drive as many targeted prospects to your website as you can
2. Convert as much of the traffic as possible into sales or sales leads
3. Communicate the Brand

One without the other is ultimately worthless, having a thousand qualified leads or visitors arrive at your site is useless if you cannot convert them to restaurant sales leads. The integrated and understanding of restaurant web design psychology will help us to work smarter and not harder when increasing the conversion rates of our traffic. In a perfect world there would be a balance from targeted traffic to a beautiful creative site that get the user to feel the perfect set of emotions to take action then purchase.

Psychology of restaurant website design needs to take balance and effectively achieve all three of these. Brand, traffic and sales. Having a thousand qualified prospects visit your site is useless if you cannot convert them to sales, sales lead, and communicate your restaurant brand then your restaurant website is the most important part of your online marketing campaign / business, the better you convert traffic the more money you will make

Efficiency vs Effectiveness

Typically when we start our online presence we have an efficiency mindset where we are in a hurry to get our site live to begin the search engine optimization and marketing then we want to drive all business to the web site, automate the entire process and put it on autopilot, and just sell stuff without ever having to come in contact the buyer. Sounds great. The first part of the process is necessary get live and market quickly to make money then we get to a point of transition to Effectiveness mode.

After the honeymoon period it time to get to work and create systems to track traffic and conversion rates, and move into testing our pages to increase the effectiveness of our pages, content, and irrisitable offers. Remember that an increase in sales per click is not the only way to increase revenue also think about and create additional offers and servicess to tap into and increase overall sales per customer.

Website Components

Restaurant Color Psychology

Restaurant color psychology is under-rated. Web designers do not take color into consideration when creating a web site. The reason? Color is just color too many.  However, color affects everything we do. The way we perceive others. Whether we are comfortable in a room. What we eat, how we dress, if we stop or go at the nearest stoplight. We do not realize the true impact color has on us, consciously and subconsciously. A smart rule of thumb when using multiple colors: do not use more than 5 colors, keep them either “warm” or “cool,” and make the background white.

Take orange for example

If you are on a diet, orange increases appetite encourages relaxation and sleep. As opposed to blue which decreases appetite, lowers the body temperature and eliminates the flight to fight response.

As a sales tool, orange is pivotal for persons making a buying decision. It makes products more attractive and appears more affordable.

Be Aware of

• Web designers often use color in a way that has a negative impact to the web sites purpose.
• demographic profile
• product
• existing logo,
• the color of the logo
• The color can /needs to be incorporated into the site.
• Balance must be achieved between the logo and the colors for the sites productivity.

Follow the Corporations

Large corporations long ago discovered the true importance of color to their products. Consider for a moment Coke and Pepsi. The predominant color for both is red. Walk into any grocery store and the majority of the packages are – red. The reason? The taste buds become more sensitive, appetite improves, and reactions become automatic.

Importance of Color in Restaurant Web Design

There’s more to restaurant websites than just images and text. A website is a marketing tool, representing the company, owner, employees and products. Beyond that, it is a personality. A restaurant website is a personality? Yes. It portrays a positive or negative symbolism and/or emotion.

In a face-to-face meeting our bodies and faces portray unspoken meanings. We smile, gesture, laugh, and become nervous. It’s these little nuances that help us communicate. A website does exactly the same thing.

The difference is: a restaurant website does it with color. Colors themselves contain a cornucopia of meaning. They can make us happy, sad, angry, comfortable, nervous, and even trusting. While it seems simple enough to choose a graphic and then design a site around that graphic, you may unintentionally be presenting a derogatory impression. The colors may contradict the content in unintended ways.

Restaurant Website Marketing

Green and white work well together, but in Japan a white carnation signifies death and a green hat in China means a man’s wife is cheating on him. A green hat with a white carnation in the brim wouldn’t be a good choice for a company logo. However, green is the easiest color on the eye; it has a calming effect which is why it is most used in hospitals. It relaxes the patients. Different shades of green have different meanings:  www.technorati.com and www.newsvine.com

Yellow-greens are the least preferred colors by consumers.

Red has been shown to increase blood pressure and heart rate. People working in a red environment work faster, but they also make more mistakes. It increases appetite, restlessness and nervous tension. Creating a site with bright red and bright blue is a very poor idea! However www.zdnet.com pulls it off very well

Bright red has the longest wavelength and bright blue has the shortest. When viewing these colors the human lens has to adjust to focus, and it tries to focus on both. This tires the eyes very quickly and will give the viewer a headache.

Websites that contain different shades of blue, or a blue and white combination tend to be more popular. Why? Blue represents calm, stability, hope, wisdom and generosity. People inherently trust blue websites faster. Add blue text and people will retain more information from your site. Combine blue, purple, and white and you have nobility. www.fordvehicles.com, www.maserati.com,

Thankfully you do not see many yellow sites. While yellow can increase concentration, it is the hardest on the eyes. Paint a room yellow and you will make babies cry and adults lose their temper. Yellow is a very spiritual color and eye catching. Used in small amounts it is very inviting, cheerful and the number one attention getter. Forget blinking animations, just use a small, nicely designed yellow graphic.

Orange has a tendency to make more expensive products seem affordable and suitable for everyone. www.ing.com

Your Personality is Your Restaurant Brand

Personalities Communicated Through Your Restaurant Website

strength, boldness, excitement, determination, desire, courage
enthusiasm, cheerfulness, affordability, stimulation, creativity
attention-grabbing, comfort, liveliness, intellect, happiness, energy
durability, reliability, safety, honesty, optimism, harmony, freshness
depth, stability, professionalism, loyalty, reliability, honor, trust
power,nobility, luxury, mystery, royalty, elegance, magic
conservatism, traditionalism, intelligence, seriousness
endurance, relaxing, confident, casual, reassuring, earthy
elegance, sophistication, formality, strength, mystery
cleanliness, purity, newness, virginity, peace, innocence, simplicity

Psychological Triggers

If turkeys moo are they cows too?

What kind of question is that?

It’s the kind that made you stop and think. It grabbed your attention. Probably made you shake your head and say, “Huh?” Without realizing it, you just reacted exactly as you were meant too. Psychology at work. Psychological triggers cause you to act or react in a way that is predictable. Your mind responds to them either consciously or subconsciously.Proper use and placement can lead a customer through a web site. Even to the point of purchase.

One of the most powerful psychological triggers is “why”. Kids love to ask the question why. Why is the sky blue? Why do birds fly? Why can’t I have a pony? Anyone who has kids or has been a kid knows these questions well.

We are curious by nature. Asking ‘why’ in a header is similar to flipping the curiosity switch. Our brain tells us that we “must know more!” And so we delve deeper into a sites content. Searching for the answer our mind seeks.Budweiser, in their infinite wisdom, came up with the slogan of “Why ask why? Drink bud dry.” That simple phrase increased their sales exponentially.

Website Psychology

Color Psychology and Psychological Triggers are powerful tools. Used together they are unbeatable! They have the ability to increase the productivity of any site, no matter the design or navigation. The challenge has always been memorability. People do not always bookmark sites, nor do they return to every site they bookmark.  Specific words are used causing the mind to remember the site. It is because of this process sites are bookmarked, remembered, and passed on. Grammatically challenged web sites can be just as successful as perfectly written sites.

Restaurant Website Psychology is a new field. It is because of this fact that people have not heard about it, and do not understand its importance. Any website can be successful, but it takes more than a product, an idea, and a web designer to make it happen.