Gormandize.com.au

[Gormandize.com.au]

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Hi,

I have just posted a little intro here: http://www.flyingsolo.com.au/forums/index.php?threads/re-introduction-venture-3.36437/

I would love to hear your thoughts about the website. I know there are a lot of excellent feedback on this forum. http://www.gormandize.com.au

My questions:

– Is it clear to you what type of service we provide?
– Is the pricing section clear enough?
– General website design
– Is there enough information?

Looking forward to your input.

[bb1]

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Damian welcome back, was wondering where you had disappeared to.

A couple of questions or comments.

Your pricing sounds cheap or I have understood it wrong. Just as an example your assessment, just in my head I have worked out at least 5 hours work, so at $30 an hour, you aren’t earning much. Like I said that’s my assessment of a minimum time period to do all of that.

And similar with the rest ie rescue $500 for 8 hours, just seems below the mark if you are planning on using good quality people.

Not sure if your services page, lines up with your pricing. ie. details I mean, you may want to break down your services better,

Personally I would make your phone number stand out a little more.

And really do you need a BIG map of where you are, I am guessing you are the one travelling, and you are only showing a PO box anyhow. Maybe use the real estate for something more, or just don’t clutter it.

your guarantee sounds good, but you will need to define what you mean very tightly. And consider that you can only achieve results based on the ability of the actual restaurant owner, and their willingness to follow your guidance and advice.

[Anonymous]

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Hi Damien,

I’ve only been able to have a quick look, so will let others comment in more detail, but one thing I did spot was a typo that occurs in several places. I think maybe ‘assessement’ is the French spelling, but in English we don’t include the e before the m.

Hope that helps,
Jayne

[Gormandize.com.au]

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FS Concierge, post: 223908, member: 2205 wrote:

Hi Damien,

I’ve only been able to have a quick look, so will let others comment in more detail, but one thing I did spot was a typo that occurs in several places. I think maybe ‘assessement’ is the French spelling, but in English we don’t include the e before the m.

Hope that helps,
Jayne

10 Years in Australia and still can’t get rid of the French roots. Thanks for pointing this out.

[Gormandize.com.au]

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bb1, post: 223897, member: 53375 wrote:

Damian welcome back, was wondering where you had disappeared to.

A couple of questions or comments.

Your pricing sounds cheap or I have understood it wrong. Just as an example your assessment, just in my head I have worked out at least 5 hours work, so at $30 an hour, you aren’t earning much. Like I said that’s my assessment of a minimum time period to do all of that.

And similar with the rest ie rescue $500 for 8 hours, just seems below the mark if you are planning on using good quality people.

Not sure if your services page, lines up with your pricing. ie. details I mean, you may want to break down your services better,

Personally I would make your phone number stand out a little more.

And really do you need a BIG map of where you are, I am guessing you are the one travelling, and you are only showing a PO box anyhow. Maybe use the real estate for something more, or just don’t clutter it.

your guarantee sounds good, but you will need to define what you mean very tightly. And consider that you can only achieve results based on the ability of the actual restaurant owner, and their willingness to follow your guidance and advice.

Thanks Bert, some good points there. I was expecting you to be the first one to comment and I was right. haha

Regarding pricing, I thought I would make the initial launch affordable in order to build a strong testimonial and show results. Also keeping in mind that the plan I have put in place need to be attractive enough to have one foot in the door and then provide further services based on the initial assessment.

But you are right ideally the rate should be around $60-$70/hr

[Byron Trzeciak]

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Hi Damien.

Firstly I’m not in the industry so take my advice lightly.

I’m not a big fan of the web design it looks like the stylesheet isn’t applying for the menu but I think it’s just the style that you’ve created for it. The way you’ve shoved the phone number into the header doesn’t work well for me either. It doesn’t respond, i.e. responsive design, and looks like the number disappears on mobile.

If I was going to have someone help me with a restaurant or cafe I’d want to know who you are

“Damien has had several General Manager roles within high-end venues and has a strong marketing knowledge. Having successfully established hatted restaurants, Damien also has a strong knowledge in pre-openings.”

To me what you’ve written really doesn’t showcase you very well. I think in order to gain significant buy in then your about page should be talking in detail which restaurants you worked for and what you specifically did to establish a hatted restaurant.

http://www.brconsultants.com.au/hospitality/about/

“We will help you with HR related questions, menus, website and much more with our dedicated email support service. When you are starting up, sometimes it can be difficult to do eveything by yourself. We have a team of talented Chefs, Restaurant general managers, sommeliers & HR advisors all ready to land a helping hand in making your business a success”

I think if you were to break down your service offerings into exactly what you do i.e. our sommelier has 20 years experience in manage and developing wine menus. We consider your menu, target customer and location and build a wine menu that perfectly compliments your food”

“We assist with creating menus, managing costs, food sizings etc”

http://www.synergyconsultants.com/services/menu-recipe-development/

I feel like the entire website is just too generic, like you’re hiding something or you’re not confident in what you’re offering.

Hope this helps.

Byron

[Gormandize.com.au]

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Byron Trzeciak, post: 223969, member: 56118 wrote:

Hi Damien.

Firstly I’m not in the industry so take my advice lightly.

I’m not a big fan of the web design it looks like the stylesheet isn’t applying for the menu but I think it’s just the style that you’ve created for it. The way you’ve shoved the phone number into the header doesn’t work well for me either. It doesn’t respond, i.e. responsive design, and looks like the number disappears on mobile.

If I was going to have someone help me with a restaurant or cafe I’d want to know who you are

“Damien has had several General Manager roles within high-end venues and has a strong marketing knowledge. Having successfully established hatted restaurants, Damien also has a strong knowledge in pre-openings.”

To me what you’ve written really doesn’t showcase you very well. I think in order to gain significant buy in then your about page should be talking in detail which restaurants you worked for and what you specifically did to establish a hatted restaurant.

http://www.brconsultants.com.au/hospitality/about/

“We will help you with HR related questions, menus, website and much more with our dedicated email support service. When you are starting up, sometimes it can be difficult to do eveything by yourself. We have a team of talented Chefs, Restaurant general managers, sommeliers & HR advisors all ready to land a helping hand in making your business a success”

I think if you were to break down your service offerings into exactly what you do i.e. our sommelier has 20 years experience in manage and developing wine menus. We consider your menu, target customer and location and build a wine menu that perfectly compliments your food”

“We assist with creating menus, managing costs, food sizings etc”

http://www.synergyconsultants.com/services/menu-recipe-development/

I feel like the entire website is just too generic, like you’re hiding something or you’re not confident in what you’re offering.

Hope this helps.

Byron

Thank you for your insight, it is very helpful. I think you are right about the lack of content and this is what I’m going to be working on this week.

Looking at other consultants website (including the one above) my first thought was “there is way too much information”. If I’m a start up cafe or restaurant and have no idea where to start I would find the information overwhelming.

Therefore I wanted to keep things simple. Focus only on restaurants and cafes and I wanted to design to remain simple.

In saying that, I’m not the most excited about the design either, but I have decided not to spend money on this one and to start by simply building this business with word of mouth. I will look at developing it properly in a few months. This is simply a free wix template, with free pictures. Nothing fancy

Good news is, I’m on day 2 of the launch and have my first lead, so its exciting!

[Peter – FS Administrator]

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Hi Damien,
Good to see you back and congrats on the second and third businesses
Some great advice here already. Keep us posted on progress.
Cheers
Peter

[getcontented.com.au]

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Hi Damien,

My comments:

• The design is quite nice – very white with red/black embellishments… reminds me of a chef’s uniform
• What is “bontact”? I think it’s supposed to be contact (bottom right on desktop version) oh… I just realised, “bontact” is the application that sends sms, email, etc. – this was NOT apparent at all for me…
• What is “Restaurant & Cafe Consulting” ? I expected “about” to describe it, at least. It might be pertinent to include a description so that people who don’t know what your service is called but actually do want your service can realise that they need you. (Never underestimate people’s inability to know what you think is obvious).
• On the mobile version, the menu “sticks” to the page, but it should float until you scroll up past it, then it should stick to the top of the page, perhaps. I don’t like the behaviour when it opens out, either (it’s possible to get into a state where the bottom of the menu is unselectable). This sticking behaviour means that it obscured the content when you scroll down.
• The four “menu” type panels (new opening, assessment, support, rescue) are not obvious until you scroll down which could be changed, possibly… they’re also not obvious to me. Are they obvious to your target market? What *are* these things? In order to find out, I have to actually click into them, and scroll down and read … this is a bit inaccessible (to my mind).
• The pricing page has some layout problems (the 5 prices are oddly shaped, and the text size is kind of all over the place).
• When you click buy now on the pricing page it comes up with a mac.com account, which seems kind of unprofessional… also, it feels a bit like I’m just giving you my money without you necessarily knowing who I am, or anything… This is potentially the problem with paypal on static sites, though you *can* put additional fields in paypal. How will you know the person’s contact details? Hm…
• Find out more takes you to pricing, but this is not correct. It should either take you to find out more information, or be changed to say “pricing”.
• Where would you point them to find out more about your service? Give them the next step… the reasons to contact you between “here is some information” and “pay us some money” – some people use a blog, newsletter, or an e-book as an incentive to connect with your audience. This is quite an important piece of your sales funnel… (which our own website is actually missing).

Other than these things, it’s a very nice site! Well done…
(There is a LOT more good with it than bad… and I’ve obviously only pointed out the problems, not all the awesomely cool things about it… I’ll try to balance up by pointing those out now):

Good things:

• Clear, clean design
• Nice graphic elements
• Good simple colour scheme
• Social networking links
• Many-method contact details are clear and present
• Your address is present, and it’s obvious you’re local (I found out this matter a lot last week!)
• Beautiful imagery
• Simple!
• Nice, Fast Server!
• Being a Single Page Application, it’s very fast to navigate.

Awesome!
Hope that helps.

Julian

[getcontented.com.au]

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Additionally, I didn’t comment on this because it wasn’t actually part of the site, but you may want to actually set up some problems and show how your service solves them… you do this a little in your marketing copy, but it might be worthwhile using them as pull-in quotes on the front page rather than simply having the four big chunky photos with titles on them.

This is the “What’s in it for me” story

Hope to help,
Julian

[Gormandize.com.au]

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getcontented.com.au, post: 224099, member: 72814 wrote:

Hi Damien,

My comments:

• The design is quite nice – very white with red/black embellishments… reminds me of a chef’s uniform
• What is “bontact”? I think it’s supposed to be contact (bottom right on desktop version) oh… I just realised, “bontact” is the application that sends sms, email, etc. – this was NOT apparent at all for me…
• What is “Restaurant & Cafe Consulting” ? I expected “about” to describe it, at least. It might be pertinent to include a description so that people who don’t know what your service is called but actually do want your service can realise that they need you. (Never underestimate people’s inability to know what you think is obvious).
• On the mobile version, the menu “sticks” to the page, but it should float until you scroll up past it, then it should stick to the top of the page, perhaps. I don’t like the behaviour when it opens out, either (it’s possible to get into a state where the bottom of the menu is unselectable). This sticking behaviour means that it obscured the content when you scroll down.
• The four “menu” type panels (new opening, assessment, support, rescue) are not obvious until you scroll down which could be changed, possibly… they’re also not obvious to me. Are they obvious to your target market? What *are* these things? In order to find out, I have to actually click into them, and scroll down and read … this is a bit inaccessible (to my mind).
• The pricing page has some layout problems (the 5 prices are oddly shaped, and the text size is kind of all over the place).
• When you click buy now on the pricing page it comes up with a mac.com account, which seems kind of unprofessional… also, it feels a bit like I’m just giving you my money without you necessarily knowing who I am, or anything… This is potentially the problem with paypal on static sites, though you *can* put additional fields in paypal. How will you know the person’s contact details? Hm…
• Find out more takes you to pricing, but this is not correct. It should either take you to find out more information, or be changed to say “pricing”.
• Where would you point them to find out more about your service? Give them the next step… the reasons to contact you between “here is some information” and “pay us some money” – some people use a blog, newsletter, or an e-book as an incentive to connect with your audience. This is quite an important piece of your sales funnel… (which our own website is actually missing).

Other than these things, it’s a very nice site! Well done…
(There is a LOT more good with it than bad… and I’ve obviously only pointed out the problems, not all the awesomely cool things about it… I’ll try to balance up by pointing those out now):

Good things:

• Clear, clean design
• Nice graphic elements
• Good simple colour scheme
• Social networking links
• Many-method contact details are clear and present
• Your address is present, and it’s obvious you’re local (I found out this matter a lot last week!)
• Beautiful imagery
• Simple!
• Nice, Fast Server!
• Being a Single Page Application, it’s very fast to navigate.

Awesome!
Hope that helps.

Julian

Hi Julian,

Thank you so much for taking the time to go through all of this in details. You have definitely provided some valuable feedback.

There are a couple of things I was aware of such as the Paypal account and the layout of the pricing (impossible to change the layout with the app).

Despite the website being clear enough, I think I will go ahead and get it developed by a professional for a more responsive design and get some copywriting done.

Yes “Bontact” haha my partner asked the same question yesterday. Same, this cannot be removed I think, maybe it needs a a paid upgrade for the app.

[getcontented.com.au]

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Flicked, post: 224105, member: 67887 wrote:

Hi Julian,

Thank you so much for taking the time to go through all of this in details. You have definitely provided some valuable feedback.

There are a couple of things I was aware of such as the Paypal account and the layout of the pricing (impossible to change the layout with the app).

Despite the website being clear enough, I think I will go ahead and get it developed by a professional for a more responsive design and get some copyrighting done.

Yes “Bontact” haha my partner asked the same question yesterday. Same, this cannot be removed I think, maybe it needs a a paid upgrade for the app.

You’re very welcome! When we build websites we actually pull the intent of the message apart quite a bit to try and determine just what the intent of your site is, and how well the design is fulfilling this intent.

Just for your edification, it’s “copywriting” (as in… the writing of copy… copy is a newspaper jargon term meaning text).

Julian

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