4 Stunning Restaurant Websites in Apex, Cary & the Raleigh Area

A great restaurant website goes beyond impressive photography – it makes it easy for hungry customers to find your menu, place an order, make a reservation, learn about your restaurant, or inquire about hosting an event.

That might sound obvious when you read it, but plenty of restaurant websites make customers work surprisingly hard to do these things. The best restaurant websites combine strong photography and visual design with something even more important: they make it easy for visitors to take the next step.

If you’re looking for inspiration for a restaurant website redesign – or you’re researching restaurant website design in Apex, NC – here are four excellent examples from restaurants in Apex, Cary, and the greater Raleigh area worth checking out.

When someone visits a restaurant website, there’s a pretty good chance they’re asking one all-important question: “What can I eat?”

Doherty’s Irish Pub does a great job of answering that question without making visitors hunt around the website.

The site’s navigation prominently features its menus, with options for the daily menu, lunch menu, brunch menu, seasonal and bar menus, and catering.

Once visitors get there, the menu experience makes it easy to browse the restaurant’s offerings across different categories. Restaurant menus can get complicated quickly – from appetizers to entrées to sides, drinks, desserts, lunch specials, brunch, etc. 

A well-organized menu helps prevent a common restaurant website problem: making hangry people work for their food.

What restaurant owners can learn from Doherty’s

For a restaurant website in Apex, Cary, or anywhere else in the Triangle, your menu should be one of the easiest things to find.

Consider:

• Making “Menu” highly visible in your primary navigation

• Separating different menus when appropriate

• Making the menu easy to browse on a phone

• Using clear categories and descriptions

• Avoiding PDFs as the only way to view your menu

• Providing an obvious path from the menu to ordering or reservations

Doherty’s also does a nice job using photography throughout the site to reinforce the food and overall restaurant experience.

The takeaway: Your website shouldn’t make customers dig for the menu. If they’re hungry, help them get to the good stuff.

Raleigh Beer Garden has a unique challenge: how do you showcase an enormous beer selection without overwhelming visitors?

One particularly useful feature is the site’s Tap List.

Rather than making customers wait until they arrive at the restaurant to discover what’s available, the website gives them an opportunity to explore the beer selection ahead of time.

The restaurant describes itself as offering more than 386 draft beers daily, so giving customers a way to browse that selection online is particularly helpful.

Think about the customer experience. Someone might be planning a night out with friends and want to know: “What do they have on tap?” The website can answer that question before the customer ever walks through the door.

That’s good restaurant website design because it isn’t just about displaying information. It’s about giving customers useful information at the moment they’re looking for it.

What restaurant owners can learn from Raleigh Beer Garden

Think beyond your basic menu when deciding what information belongs on your website.

Depending on your restaurant, useful features could include:

• Current beer or cocktail lists

• Seasonal menus

• Daily specials

• Happy hour information

• Live music schedules

• Upcoming events

• Online ordering

• Reservation information

• Catering options

Rather than cramming every feature into your website (like social icons, weather widgets, email sign-up, and more), identify the questions customers regularly ask and then answer those questions before they need to call you. 

The takeaway: Your restaurant website can be a 24/7 customer service tool if you use it to answer the questions people actually have.

City Barbeque provides a great example of a restaurant website built around a clear business objective:

Get people to order food.

The homepage immediately presents prominent calls-to-action, including “Place A New Order,” along with options for party packs and catering.

And there’s a reason this approach works. The website pairs those calls-to-action with large, appetizing food photography so that visitors immediately see the product they’re there to buy. Further, they’re given an obvious way to take action.

The site also makes its menu highly visual, with food photography, descriptions, categories, and “Order now” calls-to-action throughout the menu experience.

Great restaurant websites help move visitors toward doing something.

What restaurant owners can learn from City Barbeque

Every restaurant website should have a primary goal. Whether it’s to encourage visitors to order online, make a reservation, call the restaurant, or book a private event, your calls-to-action need to make that clear as day. 

Don’t make customers scroll through five sections of content before they discover how to order, and don’t bury your reservation button in the footer.

City Barbeque demonstrates how strong imagery and prominent calls-to-action can work together to keep visitors moving toward an order.

The takeaway: Beautiful food photography gets attention. Clear calls-to-action turn that attention into action.

Not every restaurant website visitor is looking for lunch or dinner today. Some are looking for a place to host a birthday party, corporate gathering, wedding-related event, rehearsal dinner, or other private event.

Birdie’s Barroom & Kitchen does an excellent job of catering to those visitors with a dedicated Private Events page. The page immediately introduces the event offering and includes a prominent “Inquire about an event” call-to-action. More importantly, it gives potential customers helpful information about the actual spaces available.

For example, Birdie’s provides descriptions, photos, and guest capacities for spaces including the entire restaurant, Blue Ridge Room, Veranda, and Veranda + Courtyard.

That’s a smart approach because someone considering a restaurant for an event probably has a few immediate questions:

• How many people can you accommodate?

• What does the space look like?

• Is the event private?

• Is there outdoor space?

• What does the space include?

• How do I inquire?

Birdie’s answers many of those questions directly on the page. And that’s precisely what a good restaurant website should do.

What restaurant owners can learn from Birdie’s

If private events, catering, or large parties are an important source of revenue for your restaurant, don’t treat them as an afterthought.

Create a dedicated page that sells the experience, including key information such as:

• Photos of the available spaces

• Guest capacity

• Descriptions of each space

• Types of events you accommodate

• Food and beverage information

• FAQs

• A prominent inquiry form or call-to-action

Birdie’s provides a particularly good example of turning a restaurant’s physical space into something that can be marketed online.

The takeaway: If your restaurant can host events, your website should make it easy for potential customers to picture their event happening there.

Although these four restaurants have different menus, messaging, and typical customers, there’s a common thread running through their websites: they’re focused on what customers need. And that’s the real lesson for restaurant owners considering a new website. 

Good restaurant website design goes beyond colors, fonts, animations, or having a beautiful homepage.

They have a special way of removing friction.

A customer should be able to answer questions like “What’s on the menu?”, “Can I make a reservation?”, “Can I order online?”, “Do you have outdoor seating?”, or “Can I host my event here?” without having to become a website detective. 

If you’re a restaurant owner in Apex, Cary, Holly Springs, Raleigh, or the surrounding Triangle area, your website should do more than serve as an online business card.

It should help you get more orders, reservations, event inquiries, and customers through the door.

At Conversion Fox Marketing, we build marketing-driven WordPress websites for small businesses, with an emphasis on making the website useful.

For restaurants, that means thinking through the entire customer journey: from the moment someone discovers your restaurant online to the moment they view your menu, make a reservation, place an order, or contact you about an event.

If you’re looking for restaurant website design in Apex, NC, or restaurant web design in Cary, Holly Springs, Raleigh, or the surrounding area, we’d be happy to talk about what your website could be doing better.