Bistro Square is a website created solely for restaurant owners who wish to build their business online.
Co-founded by Richie Ward, an entrepreneur knows all about the restaurant business, since his family has been in this industry for three generations now. He also has a strong experience in web hosting and developing web-based applications, therefore a perfect marriage of both his expertise to build a business idea like this.
Andrew Kurz is the other co-founder who has been in the web industry for over 10 years and has quality experience of designing and building large and small scale websites.
Bistro Square aims to provide solutions to those restaurant owners who know nothing or very little about building a website and creating online presence to connect with existing and potential customers.
Here's an overview of all the services offered by Bistro Square:
- Designing your own website from wide variety of templates by Bistro Square without any technical knowledge. These templates are created keeping in mind different types of establishments in the restaurant business, like: dining, cafe, deli and steakhouse etc.
- Social Network Integration, allowing owners to connect with their fans or followers and keeping them updated with all the latest deals or specials.
- Online Reservation system, allowing you to take reservations from your website using OpenTable online reservation system.
- Creating Online Menu, using their customizable menu builder.
- Creating virtual coupons for your customers, using their coupon builder.
- You can also incorporate Google Maps to your website.
- Bistro Square also brings you real-time statistics using Google Analytics, enabling you to analyze the behavior of the visitors to your site.
- They also provide SEO services, email marketing and help you promote your site on leading search engines.
- Bistro Square also provides web site hosting services, through their $19.99 plan/year you can get a domain for yourself.
- Since your website will be all about food and drinks, Bistro lets you upload images, photo albums, music and videos to your site.
- They also claim quality link building and promise to 'increase your organic ranking in the major search engines'.
- Other than quality link building, they also work towards building online reputation by ensuring that only accurate reviews appear in the top search engine results.
- Bistro also provides strong customer support system through emails, live chat or phone.
- They provide a list of how-to videos, that can help you in understanding building your website better and resolve general issues that you may have.
"I'm sure that there are some out there who have a background in web development and just kind if landed in the restaurant industry that could build a website themselves and never need our service. But by and large there seem to be restaurateurs out there who are excellent at running restaurants but don't really know where to start when it comes to building a website. That's who our product is geared towards." shares Richie Ward with Mashable.
Bistro Square offers variety of plans depending on your establishment, their free plan lets you build your own website with 20 MB disk space and 100 MB transfer. Whereas, their $29.99/month plan suits startup restaurants, $39.99/month plan is meant for establishments with 1 or 2 locations and their $49.99/month is best suited for multi-location restaurants. Click here to check out these plans in detail.
Overall, it seems to be a promising site that knows what and who they are dealing with. According to them, "the restaurant industry in the United States is over a half trillion dollar industry and accounts for over 12 million jobs". Keeping these statistics in mind and scarcity of websites that provide these kind of services, their business idea could take them a long way...provided they deliver what they promise.
So have a look at their website here, and take it for a spin if you like. But do remember to share your feedback in the comment section below.
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It seems as though most restaurant websites just don't work (Where are the hours? The Menu? Why so much Flash?). Bistro square looks like it can be a tool that may help fix the issues with restaurant websites.
We totally agree with you, Andrew. BistroSquare is already doing a great job, helping restauranteurs with the website and stuff.