A venue website built for the guest who books on a phone at a bus stop.

A venue website is doing several jobs at once, and a site that does six of them well and misses two still loses bookings on the two it misses. The list below is not aspirational: each item is something a guest is trying to do on your site right now, whether or not the site is built to let them.

Being found

A guest searching your own name should land on your site, your opening hours and your booking page. That means your opening hours need to be readable by search engines directly, through structured data (a piece of code in the page that states your hours in a machine-readable form, rather than leaving Google to guess from the text on the page). Where hours and listings drift out of sync across the web, guests turn up at the door on the wrong day.

Showing the room

Photography earns its place by helping someone decide whether to book: the dining room lit as it actually looks in the evening, a table set, a service moment. Stock photography of food that isn't on your menu, or an empty room shot flat and bright, tells a guest nothing they can act on.

Showing the menu

The menu on the site should be the menu in the room, updated when dishes change. A menu built for the guest helps them decide in the time it takes to read it, which is a different job from listing everything the kitchen is proud of.

Taking the booking

The booking button should be visible without scrolling and should take as few taps as the booking system allows. Vinrose does not recommend or rank booking systems, POS or ordering platforms; those are choices each venue makes on its own terms, and the website's job is to connect to whichever one you use cleanly.

Answering the questions guests ring about

Parking, dress code, whether the venue takes dogs, whether there's a private room, whether children are welcome: these are the questions that generate phone calls when they're missing from a site, and phone calls are time a small team doesn't always have. Answering them on the page doesn't remove every call, but it removes the ones asking something the site should already have said.

Carrying allergen information lawfully

The Food Information Regulations 2014, and the amendment known as Natasha's Law (the Food Information (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2021), set out what a venue must be able to tell a guest about the fourteen allergens in a dish, and what has to be labelled where food is prepacked for direct sale. Enforcement sits with local authority environmental health, and the Food Standards Agency publishes current guidance. A website that carries allergen information needs it structured and current.

Loading fast

A slow site loses guests before they've seen the room, particularly on a phone at a bus stop with three bars of signal. Large unoptimised images and heavy page scripts are the usual cause, and both are fixable at the build stage.

Telling the truth

What the site says about the venue, its hours, its accessibility and what it can license itself to offer needs to match what's actually true on the night. The Equality Act 2010 and the accessibility standard WCAG 2.1 set out what good practice looks like for a website itself; the Licensing Act 2003 governs what a venue in England and Wales can say it offers. Neither is a matter for the website to advise on, but the copy on the site should not claim more than the venue can deliver.

The full list, with the reasoning behind each item, is in What a Restaurant or Hotel Website Actually Has to Do. The opening hours and listings problem specifically is covered in Opening Hours, Listings and Being Found for Your Own Name, and how a menu should be built to sell rather than just list is in Menu Design.