Malaysians Love Food

With at least a handful of restaurants popping up anywhere and at anytime around Malaysia, we really are spoilt for choice of getting something to eat.

With the Malaysian love of food, it’s little wonder that many business people are starting up restaurants of all types, trying to cash in on this nationwide obsession.

But to start a restaurant and to have it succeed in the long run is a very different story.

Traditional Advertising Methods

Malaysian restaurant owners usually market their food in a few ‘traditional’ ways, by that I mean:

• Advertising in free brochures which are distributed into mail boxes or stuck on windshileds in and around their neighbourhood.
  • Problem: People tend to throw away these items as ‘junk’. I do and I’m sure so do you.
• Advertising in newspapers and magazines
  • Problem: Cost. RM1,000+ for a 1 day long advert in black and white?
• Word of mouth. This can be really effective if word spreads fast and furious about your new restaurant.
  • Problem: But it’s not easy to do it right, just telling friends is sometimes not enough to bring in the business

But one method that is often overlooked is using the power of the Internet to advertise their restaurant.

The Power Of The Internet

Using the Internet is 9 times out of 10 much cheaper than traditional ‘real world’ marketing. It can bring in more eyeballs, it is more trackable and if done right is even more effective than traditional print or television advertising.

Having a website for your restaurant is like having the power of a brochure which can be seen 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year. It is now seen as a must, with the added benefits of being:

• Highly trackable with software such as Google Analytics to see what words people are using to find your website and where they are coming from
• Implementing online only promotions such as online coupons to see how effective your promotions are to people
• Online advertising on food related websites linking back to your website, as people on these websites are already looking for food or places to eat

Inside The Box, Restaurant Marketing Specialists

Inside The Box Web Services pride ourselves in being a one stop shop for a restaurant’s web presence and online marketing solutions.

We create clean, dynamic websites for restaurant owners, as seen in our portfolio of past work.

We offer online advertising through our own food portal, Feedmelah.com! using our in-built advertising spaces.

We know how to use things such as SEO, Pay Per Click, Google Advertising and Blogging to help restaurants owners get maximum exposure for their website and restaurant.

So for new restaurant owners and even small businesses alike, online marketing is as important in the modern times as traditional marketing efforts.

Get more bang for your buck with the simple yet affordable act of getting a website.

We’ll help you take it from there.

Some food for thought.

Contact Us to find out more

Banana Cafe Catering is a catering service with more than 25 years of experience in their field and so have become a well known name among their regular customers.

From these customers they gain through word of mouth marketing and so people knew of them. However, they never had a website where people could find out more information about them.

Inside The Box recently created a website for their catering services at http://bananacafe.com.my and implemented our proven SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies that we’ve regularly been using on our own sites.

Within just a short while, the site was being indexed by Google. Which in it’s own right may or may not be useful. For example, if Google has only indexed your site for the ‘About Us’ page and ‘Contact Us’ page, but not for all your pages, it may not help that much.

Within the first 2 months you can see the types of keywords that the Banana Cafe site was taking in from Google:

With such targeted visitors, we know that the website is generating more leads for them than they had before.

And the SEO strategies used were extremely simple, by basing the Web Design on a Wordpress platform, using the All In One SEO plugin so that the page titles are rewritten from the default title.

Also, you have to keep in mind what people are looking for which your business can provide.

In this case, we knew through talking to the owners that they could offer table decorations and canopy designs. We made sure to mention this in both the subheading and the body content on their ‘services’ page – http://bananacafe.com.my/services/

As you can see, this was also picked up by Google:

Although not many at first, there are other keywords that you could target, such as ‘floral arrangements’ (in the case of Banana Cafe) and even ‘Halal Catering’.

If you’d like to know more about our SEO capabilities and how to implement in your site, contact us online.

The web design process for a restaurant is typically quite different and potentially alot simpler than that of a regular business website.

The reason being that a restaurant already has it’s own styling, photos (from their menu) and a brand direction that has already been established.

Although restaurants may opt for a full-flash based website, our suggestion would be to keep the site useable on all web browsers at all locations.

A lot of web traffic comes from employees at their offices and if they’re looking for a restaurant they typically go to a restaurant directory from where they will be directed to the restaurant’s website.

Remember: Javascript and Flash (used to run Facebook and similar sites) may not work in the office. So if your entire web page is flash based, albeit nicer looking, may not even load on their web browser.

Which would be pointless.

Restaurant owners, contact us for a fast and affordable solution for your restaurant’s web site.

The days of designing for 800 x 600, 15 inch monitors are long gone. The future is looking more and more like 1024 x 768 on 17 inch LCD monitors, AT LEAST.

But what can get designers to make mistakes is although they’re designing a website for a resolution of 1024 x 768, the computer screen that they are using is probably 1240 x 1028, on a 21 inch monitor or a wide screen laptop.

This can lead to mistakes when it comes to sizing the viewable webpage when they upload their design.

Designers can easily make the webpage too big to fit on a 1024 x 768 monitor, as this represents the total resolution (including web browser, taskbar etc.) and not the maximum viewable resolution.

If you’re using Dreamweaver however, you’re in luck… It has an option to view the maximum viewable area for different monitor sizes.

Make sure you are in ‘Design View’, unmaximized and click the drop down list as show above.

From the list, select the size of the resolution you are targeting. For convenience, I’ve listed down the common ones below:

1. 536 x 196 (640 x 480 resolution)
2. 760 x 420 (800 x 600 resolution)
3. 955 x 600 (1024 x 768 resolution)

Welcome to our new blog, where we’ll actively bring you web design updates, useful tools and services as well as other related news to help people looking for websites, or even those wanting to design their own.

We hope it helps…