We build websites for restaurants, guesthouses, bars and venues, and much the same pattern turns up in nearly every one. Atmosphere gets the attention and the budget, while the practical layer (opening hours, parking, how somebody actually books a table) gets whatever is left over. Some of that you can repair yourself this week, and some of it needs a rebuild.
The information people actually arrived to find
Watch somebody use a restaurant website on a phone and it is almost never a browse. They arrive with one fact in mind, usually the opening hours or a table for six at seven, and if the answer takes more than ten seconds many of them go back to the search results.
Usually the information exists in the wrong format: the menu is a PDF that opens as a postage stamp on a phone, the hours live on a Facebook post from March, and Google shows a third set from a Business Profile nobody has touched since 2022. Sorting that out is admin rather than design work, and worth an hour of somebody's time.
Put the hours and the address into the page as real text, in the footer of every page, and add opening hours structured data so Google can read them. Then make the exceptions obvious, because the ordinary week is rarely what somebody checks. People phone about Christmas week and the January fortnight when the kitchen shuts.
What the photography is doing for you
At Sallymount House, a guesthouse we worked with, the photography carries the decision, as it does for most places with rooms. Somebody weighing up a few hundred dollars a night wants to see the room, and the light in it at breakfast, before committing. Words are no use for that part, so the pictures carry most of the evidence.
Where it goes wrong is usually the execution: a full screen video hero that takes six seconds to load on a weak signal, or photos exported at four megabytes because they came from a print brochure. A photography day with somebody who shoots hospitality runs CA$1,500 to $3,500, and we argue for keeping it when other things come out.
Brainstorm, the studio's Irish practice, established in 2010, has been building for hotels, guesthouses and venues for most of that time, and there is a longer account of how that work usually runs if you want the shape of a project first. The pattern here is close to identical, allowing for different booking platforms.
Direct booking and the commission arithmetic
For anyone with rooms, the commission you pay usually decides whether a website budget makes sense. Rates on the large platforms run between fifteen and twenty percent, higher again if you buy visibility, so a $220 room night costs you north of thirty dollars. Move a modest share onto your own site and the build pays for itself inside a season or two.
Leaving the platforms altogether is not something we would advise, since they are how a large share of guests find you, and people compare on your own site only because the listing was there. The goal is to be the better option once somebody lands on you: a booking engine that works on a phone, and a reason to book direct that your rate agreements allow.
Restaurants are running a smaller version of the same sum, since a reservation platform charges per cover or a flat monthly fee, and the widget it drops into your page is often the slowest thing on it. Plenty of forty seat rooms take bookings by phone and a simple form with no loss, which saves the fee and some layout compromise.
Venues work differently again, because an events enquiry is not something anybody completes in one sitting. On Thomond Park the job was getting a serious enquiry into the right hands with enough detail to be useful. A venue page carries capacity by room and layout, whether catering is in house, how a supplier gets a van in, and a form that asks the headcount.
Whoever updates the menu on a Tuesday afternoon
One of the first things Dave Curtin asks on a hospitality project is who will update this, and how much of their week they have. The answer is usually a duty manager with twenty minutes between services, or an owner doing it at eleven at night. That constraint shapes the build more than any decision about how it looks.
So menus go in as structured content, dish by dish, rather than as an uploaded PDF, so a price change takes a minute and nothing in the layout moves. Seasonal switches get built as something you turn on rather than rebuild, the Christmas menu or a festival weekend list. Owners who have to email us for a price change stop making price changes by month three.
The Red Hen and Nevilles both arrived with that shape of problem, small teams and menus that move. What we built for them is ordinary: somebody in the business can edit a dish, change a price or close the kitchen for a week without asking us. Neither has needed to send us a menu change since.
The months after launch need a budget line of their own, because somebody has to apply platform updates, keep the backups honest and fix whatever breaks when a booking provider changes their embed code. We do that on a small monthly arrangement, and there is a plain description of what it covers on the Irish site. In house is fine, as long as a name is against it.
Access, parking and the things nobody phones to ask
Accessibility comes in two versions here, your building and your website, and hospitality needs both of them. The building one is simpler than people expect: whether there is a step at the front door, whether the dining room is up the stairs, how far the nearest accessible parking is in metres rather than reassurances, and whether the accessible toilet is behind the bar.
Write it down on a page called Access and be honest about the parts that are not good. Somebody planning an evening out in a wheelchair will read a straight account of a step and decide for themselves, whereas they are not going to ring you to find out. Allergen information, dogs and high chairs belong on the same page.
Your website's own accessibility is a smaller job than it sounds when it is handled during the build. Aim at WCAG 2.2 AA, which means text with enough contrast against a photograph, tap targets a thumb can hit, alt text on images that carry information, and a booking flow somebody can finish with a keyboard. Retrofitting that later costs several times more.
What it costs, and what to do before you spend
The numbers, since they are why most people read this far, start around CA$5,000 for a straightforward site covering one restaurant or a small guesthouse. Most hospitality redesigns we do land between $12,000 and $30,000, the range driven by photography, the number of rooms or menus, and the booking systems involved. A brand and website programme runs $30,000 to $80,000.
Before any of that there is a free afternoon's work worth doing. Claim and correct your Google Business Profile, holiday exceptions included. Put the address, phone and hours as text in the footer of every page and make the number tappable. Then stand outside your own front door and try to book a table on your phone, on the mobile network rather than the wifi.
There is also a case for not spending, and we make it fairly often. If enquiries arrive and nobody answers them for two days, or the photography is the weak part, a new website fixes neither. We have told people to spend four thousand on a photographer and keep the site they had. Come back to a rebuild when the site itself is what holds you up.