✔ Show restaurateurs the solution in action, not just on paper
✔ Let guests book a table themselves – on the floor plan, at any time
✔ Take takeaway and delivery orders without paying platform commission
✔ Let the owner update the menu, prices and sold-out dishes on their own
✔ Bring bookings, orders, enquiries and guests together in one team back office
✔ Grow from the simplest package to the full one on the same website
Restaurants in French-speaking Switzerland lose guests at the same points again and again: the phone rings in the middle of service, the PDF menu is unreadable on a phone, delivery platforms take 25–35% of every order, and banquet enquiries get buried in the inbox. Rather than build yet another one-off website, I wanted a product that suits a ten-table café just as well as a restaurant with a terrace and delivery.
So I built one website with three packages – Essentiel, Visibilité and Premium. Each one builds on the previous one, so a venue can start with a simple shop window and add booking or online ordering later without rebuilding anything. I developed the menu, booking, ordering, gift cards and team back office as separate modules on my own theme and plugin, on top of WooCommerce.
The result is DemoResto, a fictional restaurant on the shores of Lake Geneva where restaurateurs try everything themselves – first as a guest, then as the owner. The packages switch with one click, every visitor can have their own copy of the restaurant for 24 hours, and the site works in French and English.
A ready-made product that restaurateurs can try for themselves before ordering anything.
Guests pick a time, the dining room, terrace or private room and a table – confirmed instantly
Takeaway and delivery: times based on kitchen load, delivery zones, card and TWINT payments
Bookings, floor, orders, kitchen, enquiries, guests and figures – with roles for owner, floor and kitchen
Prices, sold-out dishes, 14 allergens and dietary filters – changes show on the site straight away
Gift cards with a code and PDF, loyalty points and a guest account
Visitors launch their own copy of the restaurant for 24 hours and can change anything in it
I built the restaurant website from modules: each package includes the previous one and adds features of its own.
The website handles several key tasks:
Guaranteed reply within 24 hours.
The first call is free and with no commitment.
Restaurants, cafés and bars in French-speaking Switzerland need more than a good-looking website: they need a tool that takes bookings, orders and enquiries while the team is busy on the floor. DemoResto shows such a solution in full – in three packages you can try before ordering anything.
It is hard for restaurateurs to choose a website from a description: phrases like “online booking” and “back office” mean little until you try them yourself. So instead of a presentation, I built DemoResto – a fictional restaurant with a dining room, a terrace and a private room on the shores of Lake Geneva in Lausanne. Everything a real restaurant would get works here: the menu, booking, ordering, gift cards, events and the team back office.
There are two ways to explore the demo – as a guest and as the owner. The “Démo” panel offers ready-made scenarios: “Dinner for two”, “Order for home”, “At the restaurant”, “Banquet”, “Gift card”, “Menu management” and “Guest account”. Payments and e-mails are only simulated: nothing leaves the site, and the e-mails it sends can be read right inside the demo.
In the shared demo, the back office is read-only and guests’ personal details are hidden. To change prices, accept bookings or issue gift cards, visitors launch their own copy of the restaurant: for 24 hours it is available to them alone, and then it is wiped.
The core idea of the product is one website that grows with the venue. The packages differ in features, not in the quality of the design, and each one includes the previous one. In the demo you switch between them with one click.
Essentiel – a digital front door. For a café, bar, tea room or bakery that mainly needs to be found and called:
Visibilité – guests book by themselves. For a restaurant with a dining room that needs to fill its tables without phone calls at peak time:
Premium – the venue sells online. For places that do takeaway, delivery and events:
Beyond the website itself, the packages include setting up the Google Business Profile, Swiss directories and social media profiles, and the number of languages grows too: from French in Essentiel to four languages in Premium.
Booking is the heart of the Visibilité package. Guests choose a date and the number of people, then a time from the available slots and a place: the dining room, the terrace or a private room. They can pick a specific table right on the floor plan. While the guest is entering their details, the table is held for them, so double bookings simply can’t happen.
Once the booking is confirmed, the guest receives an e-mail with the booking number and can add the visit to their calendar or change or cancel the booking via a secure link. If everything is taken, they can join the waiting list. Groups of more than eight can request a group menu, and in Premium a deposit can be taken for large tables.
The “Rooms and terrace” page shows each area with photos and a plan, along with how many tables are still free for the next dinner service – taken straight from the bookings.
The menu is not a PDF but a live catalogue of dishes that the owner edits. Guests can search by dish or ingredient, filter by diet (vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, lactose-free), exclude any of the 14 allergens and use a “served now” filter. The menu can also be printed or saved as a PDF.
Dishes have options and extras, and the price updates as soon as they are selected. A dish outside its serving hours or marked as sold out can’t be ordered, and sold-out dishes come back automatically the next day.
In Premium, guests place takeaway or delivery orders. The site suggests a pick-up time based on how busy the kitchen is and how long the dishes in the basket take to prepare, checks the address against the delivery zones, and applies the minimum order value and the free delivery threshold. Promo codes, card payments and TWINT all work, and after paying, the guest can follow the order through each stage: accepted, being prepared, ready, on its way.
In the dining room, every table has a QR code: the menu opens with the table number, guests order from their phone, call the waiter or ask for the bill – and the team sees the request instantly.
For the team, I built a separate back office that doesn’t involve the WordPress admin at all. It has a section for every part of the job: “Today”, bookings and calendar, a live floor plan, orders and the kitchen screen, enquiries, events, guests, menu, website content, gift cards, figures, team, settings and loyalty.
Access is split by role: the owner, manager, front-of-house manager, kitchen and editor each see and change only what concerns them. The floor plan shows which tables are free, where guests are expected any minute and where they are already seated. Banquet enquiries become guest cards with an assigned team member and notes, and lists can be exported to CSV.
The “Figures” section shows totals for the last 30 days and the most popular dishes.
Gift cards are bought online: a fixed or custom amount, one of three designs and a message for the recipient. Each card comes with a personal code and a printable PDF, and it can be spent in several goes – in the restaurant, staff redeem it through the back office, never for more than the remaining balance.
Regular guests collect loyalty points and get a birthday treat. The guest account shows the next booking, past orders, favourites and points; a favourite order can be repeated in one click, and part of the bill can be paid with points.
The events page lists what’s coming up and also shows it as a monthly calendar; each event has its own page and a counter of the places left. The banquet enquiry form collects the date, format, number of guests and budget, and lets the guest choose a banquet menu and place a group pre-order for dishes straight away.
People eat with their eyes first, so the design is built around the food: the first screen shows a plate shot from above with a price badge, followed by alternating dark and light sections with square photos of dishes. The site has a dark and a light theme, and guests can switch between them.
Along with the website, the venue gets a brand identity gathered on a separate page: a logo mark, colour palettes for both themes, the Cormorant Garamond and Jost typefaces, buttons and price tags in the Swiss “34.–” format, an icon set, guidelines for food photography and the tone of voice. The site is built for the phone first.
Guests check Google first, then the menu, and only then decide whether to book or go next door. A restaurant loses them at simple points: nobody picks up the phone in the middle of service, the PDF menu can’t be read on a phone, a tourist doesn’t understand French.
Delivery and booking platforms do bring in new guests, but they take 25–35% of every order and keep the guest’s contact details for themselves. Your own website doesn’t replace them entirely – it brings your regular guests back to you:
You don’t have to start with everything. A café can launch with Essentiel and add booking, ordering or a second language to the same website later – without rebuilding it.
