Restaurant Menus on Mobile Websites

The Catalog/Menu page type in the Mobile Management area is perfect for building restaurant menus. This page type allows you to add items and organize them using "spacers".

Add Spacers

A "Spacer" is a simple displayed title that can be used to organize your menu. A common use for this is to organize your menu by food types: "Soups" "Salads" etc. Below each spacer you can add items (the actual menu items).

Add Items

Items are your actual menu items. This would be a specific soup, sandwich or salad that people will order. Items have 3 fields. First you add a name and then a price. The 3rd field is a content area where you can add a description, insert a photo or even add a video.

Menus Are Essential

One of the main reasons web users visit restaurant websites is to view the menu. They want to see what you have and find out how much it will cost them. Many people are unlikely to go to a restaurant with no idea what the food is like. Having some kind of menu, be it a sample or a full menu is essential to bringing in customers.

Mobile Website Sub Menus

Sub-Menus are pretty much what they sound like. Instead of having all your pages on one large menu, you can have lower levels of navigation that allow users to move through your site in organized areas. Sub-Menus on a mobile website can be equated to a drop down on the main menu of a standard website.

Utilizing sub-menus on your mobile site can improve navigation and increase the time people spend on your site. Sub-Menus can be used strategically in a few specific areas. Here are some tips for utilizing sub-menus on your mobile website.

Restaurant Menus and Product Catalogs

This is a great place to use sub-menus. Instead of plopping your entire catalog of items or your entire restaurant menu on one large page, you can use sub-menus to break it up and organize. For instance, a restaurant could make a sub menu with 3 pages: "Breakfast", "Lunch", and "Dinner" - each of which are their own distinct page outlining the food items for that meal. The sub-menu in this situation divides the content in an organized way, so you do not have too much on one page.

A retail store with a plethora of items could implement this same strategy to break up their catalog into departments or types of products. The degree of specificity you take it to is up to you. You could have 4 levels deep of sub-menus to clearly organize everything, or keep it simple with a 2 level structure.

Photo Galleries and Media

You can also organize media on your mobile website with sub-menus. The simplest way to break this up is by media type. For instance on your main menu you have "Media" which opens a sub-menu. This sub-menu then has "Videos", "Photos" and 'Audio Clips". Each of these pages feature media of that certain type.

You can also break your media up more categorically. Let's say you are a non-profit organization who does a variety of activities. You could have a sub-menu called "Media" and a photo gallery on that sub-menu called "Building Projects". In this gallery you feature images of various building projects. You could have more galleries, all featuring images of their own distinct activity type.

Mobile Website Sub-Menus

No two organizations are the same. No two mobile websites are exactly the same. It is important to figure out what works best for your mobile site. Sub-Menus can be very useful, but be sure to not overcomplicate your mobile website or make your navigation so complicated that users get lost.