Independent food-and-drink industry website platform Happytables introduced its all-new version on Tuesday. Happytables 3 brings a higher level of simplicity and speed to the process of creating and maintaining websites for restaurants, bars, and cafes.
The new version of Happytables aims to make website creation intuitive: users can drag and drop blocks to create the page structure, then edit and rearrange from the front end all while viewing the content as visitors do. Users get a whole new conversion-driven, responsive design and websites can now have a number of external service integrations relevant to the restaurant industry like Yelp, Foursquare, Instagram, Untapped, and more.
Many restaurants force customers to download PDF menus, causing users to get blocked by Flash or go on a treasure hunt for opening hours. In a market where mobile dominates daily screen-time, many restaurant websites are not user-friendly. Happytables aims at changing this.
Happytables was first introduced in 2013 as a fully responsive website-builder allowing restaurant owners to create a site in seconds, giving a prescribed structure, pages, and a custom dashboard for managing content completely focused on the needs of the restaurant industry. Happytables 3 allows restaurants to be creative without compromising accessibility, readability, and other important pillars of web design.
The platform is built by WordPress development company Human Made: the only WordPress.com VIP partner in Europe, and the owner of Happytables.
"Happytables was built to help empower independent restaurants to create and manage their own websites online. The web is becoming increasingly competitive, and restaurants need to be able to update their websites continuously, both across desktop and mobile,” says CEO Noel Tock. "When it comes to restaurant websites, we believe less is more. We’ve done continuous research to find out what are the primary things users look for at a restaurant website. We built Happytables based on that research to help restaurant owners get the most relevant information out there."
The Happytables Features
Happytables has all the typical features a user might look for at a restaurant website, including location, opening hours, food menu with menu item photos, user reviews, and contact information. Owners can also make use of Internet commerce features that drive real revenue like third-party services for reserving a table or ordering online.
Restaurants can create and manage their own websites without having to hire an agency or deal with a complex website builder that doesn’t cater to restaurants.
"Running a bar with a very small team is tough. The last thing you can think of is spending your limited resources for website development. We started several times with different website builders, but it was too time consuming and we ended up dropping it every times." says Antonia Chonos, a craft beer bar owner in Sofia, Bulgaria. "Happytables was a miracle solution – within a day our good looking and fully functional site was online, it had everything we needed, looked amazing on mobil,e and the best part is that we can manage the content easily by ourselves any time we’d like to."