More information is available on our examples page.

Part of building a great restaurant website is to take fantastic photographs of freshly prepared food that looks good enough to eat. Getting this right is surprisingly tricky; we find that many restaurant websites around Perth use amateur photograps that make their food look less than palatable.

Compare, for instance, this amateur photograph from a Vietnamese restaurant in Perth with this one, taken by a professional photographer for inclusion in the website we created for Viet Hoa Restaurant. Even though both photographs are of the same dish, the professionally taken photograph looks much better: the colours are more vibrant, everything's in focus, the dish doesn't look wet and oily, it's easier to see what you get on your plate when you order the dish, and, not least of all, it's the right way up!

We most recently worked with Nik Babic, a great professional photographer, who really did his homework regarding food photography. Nik recommended that we take a look at the work of local foodbloggers such as the food pornographer and Abstract Gourmet.

At GeekSalt we're dedicated to making great restaurant websites, and being in control of professional food photography is part of that process. Customers will beat a path to your door if your website features photographs of delicious looking dishes that practically jump off the plate. Publish blurry, washed-out amateur happy snaps, though, and don't be surprised if people decide not to visit.

Fibber McGee's was a whole other story. Several years ago they had considered building a website. Someone set up a "coming soon" page at fibbermcgees.net that proudly declared that the website would be coming "in 2008", and which listed menu items that are no longer served at the restaurant. These kinds of placeholder pages do more harm than good, as they give your potential customers an incorrect expectation of your restaurant.

Unfortunately for us, Google has indexed this incorrect web site, and many of the restaurant portals referenced it in their listings. We're still working to correct this.

The owners of Fibber McGee's had also talked to someone at a large web design company in Perth (we won't mention names) about building a website for them. They never went ahead with it, signing no contracts, but someone at the web design company did register fibbermcgees.com.au anyway, and that's the domain that we wanted (as .com.au web addresses are much more suitable for Australian businesses, as they carry more authority with search engines and with website visitors).

Imagine our surprise to discover that the large, Perth-based web design company that shall not be mentioned was not going to make it easy for us to transfer the domain name! Rather than admitting that they had no ownership rights, and speedily transferring it to us for free, they had the temerity to invoice the owners of Fibber McGee's, requiring that they pay almost $150 up front for the rights to the name of their own business from a company that they never signed a contract with. Sheesh!

Of course, we could have gone through a lengthier process to dispute this, and to transfer the domain name to us without payment being required, but we pride ourselves on implementing web sites more quickly than the large web design companies out there, so we did the right and proper thing - we gave Fibber McGee's a discount to cover this totally unreasonable expense.

This boils down to two lessons learned for us:

1. Make sure you organise your domain name as early as possible in the process of working for a client, as it may take some time to become available (but definitely don't register it before the client is signed up).
2. Other web design companies out there may behave in amoral, obstructive and unethical ways just to make a quick buck, or to cover costs that they should never have incurred in the first place. Don't be like them!

Anyway, we're happily implementing the website for Fibber McGee's as I write this, and we look forward to unveiling it very soon.

What is surprising is the Fibber McGee's story. From the outside it looks like a traditional Irish Pub. Go there to eat, though, and you'll quickly discover that the food is anything but ordinary pub grub. To the contrary, there is an unexpected passion for great food and the best produce at Fibber McGee's. Unbelievably, they own and operate an organic farm that supplies much of their produce, from vegetables to eggs, pork, lamb and beef. And why stop there? At Fibber McGee's they dry-age their own rib-eye for an average of 40 days, which enhances the flavour and tenderness tremendously.

No wonder the Sunday Times recently declared that Fibber McGee's serves the best dry-aged steak in Perth.

At GeekSalt we love to work with clients who are as passionate about their food as we are about making great restaurant websites. Which is why we were disappointed when we didn't receive a call-back from Fibber McGee's after dropping in one afternoon to give the front-of-house staff a copy of our brochure, and to subject them to our five-minute pitch.

I'll write a lengthy post about how difficult it is to scale a business from zero customers, especially when you've chosen to avoid the route of hiring sales staff.

We decided not to take silence as an answer. After enjoying another meal at Fibber McGee's, I wrote an email to its owner, explaining how much I'd enjoyed the food, how I thought their existing website (which proudly declared it was "coming in 2008", and which highlighted  a woefully outdated version of their menu) was potentially harmful, and how I thought we could help to bring their unique story to a large audience of food lovers around Perth.

And that's how Fibber McGee's became our second client. We've thoroughly enjoyed working with them, and we had a great time taking photographs at the restaurant and on the farm. We look forward to launching their website later this month. Make sure you look out for it!

We both love eating out, and were frustrated with the poor quality of most restaurant websites. We found they tend to favour style over substance, omit essential information (such as opening hours), don't work on our iPhones, feature amateur photography that somehow renders all food unappetizing, and only include PDF versions of their menu, if at all.

Happily, we discovered we're not alone. Many people have written about their own frustration with restaurant websites. We particularly like the articles by Tony Naylor and Peter Cherches on the subject.

Matthew and I both previously worked for one of the several large web development companies in Perth, which was a fantastic experience for us. More importantly, it exposed us to few problems with traditional web design:

1. It can take a long time to get a website designed, implemented and available. Many of these delays are due to the fact that a lot of decision making is delegated to the client. We realised we could speed things up by encouraging our clients to trust us to make the right decisions for their business on their behalf.
2. The software which makes it possible for clients to make changes to their website is usually written in-house (at additional expense), and may be difficult to use. Our insight was to use SquareSpace, who offer a best-of-breed interface for clients, and who also look provide world-class hosting and technical support.
3. All production of the website is usually done by a few designers. Apart from placing a limit on how many websites can be produced at a time, this can also stifle creativity. Matthew and I realised that we could outsource our design requirements to thousands of designers around the world, and we chose 99designs to provide this service. This allows us to offer our clients a choice between several professional, original, quality designs, and means that our designers continue to work for us 24 hours a day. It's great!
4. The whole process of signing up new clients is sales-based. Not only does this increase the "cost of acquisition", but it can lead to unrealistic promises being made to clients by non-technical staff. We wanted to work for a company where new clients came to us, based on the exceptional quality of the work we do, and where we are in direct contact with our clients.

Building great websites for restaurants in Perth seemed like a natural match when we coupled our frustration with existing restaurant websites with the problems we saw at large web design companies.

So that's exactly what we did. Mathew and I established GeekSalt, and we're now working hard to manage the process of building restaurant websites, applying our knowledge of both quality web design and of the problems with most extisting restaurant websites.

By specialising in restaurant website design we can focus on building the best possible solution for each of our clients, including such things as managing their listing on restaurant portals such as MenuLog and UrbanSpoon. This allows us to offer our clients a much better value proposition than our competitors (the large web design companies around town who take on work in all industry segments). Streamlining our business in this way means we can build websites more quickly while reducing costs, allowing us to pass on these savings to our clients.

The market for a restaurant website specialist is potentially huge: we estimate that few restaurants in Perth already have a great website, some don't have any kind of website, and many have a poor website. Our goal is to help 10% of restaurants with no website, or with a poor website, to improve the performance of their business. If we can manage that, then we'll have a sustainable business ourselves (as that will amount to several hundred clients).

It's an exciting time for us, and we hope to write about many of the ups and downs behind the scenes as we grow our business. Stay tuned!

The design was surprisingly hard to implement, due to the different heights of the background image on each page, thankfully the photoshop design was well laid out, making the cut-up process much easier.

Many thanks to everyone who submitted concepts to 99Designs, and congratulations to Borizanoff for submitting the winning design!

We will be adding more content to the site and making some tweaks over the coming weeks.