Raise profile
Nowadays a chef doesn’t only create delicious dishes for his or her restaurant. More and more chefs are becoming the public face of their establishment. Think about people like Michel Roux Jnr, Gordon Ramsey, Emeril Lagase. These very public faces have helped the chefs to develop their businesses into global brands. Okay, so you may not break into the mass media, but your website can help you to raise your profile, even if it’s just in your local area. People will be able to learn about you, your food, your style, even your signature dish. If you have an ethos behind your cooking – sustainable or seasonal or vegetarian, for example – your website is a great place for you to have all of this information.
This is as important for personal chefs as it is for those working in restaurants, quite possibly more important. A website can give a personal chef a virtual presence, a store front that they normally wouldn’t have without a restaurant. A personal chef might want to include information about the types of menus that they produce, their rates and any testimonials that they have from their happy, and satisfied, customers. There are plenty of website builders out there that can help a self-employed personal chef build their own business website to high specifications but at a low cost.
Manage your Brand
Having your own website helps you to manage your brand. As you have complete control over it you can decide on the overall tone and style of your website. This brand control lets you be in charge of how you appear to the world. Whether you want to be quirky, serious, bohemian or haute cuisine, the web page design can help you to convey your overall brand.
Show off Your Skill
A website can be a wonderful place for a chef to show off their creative flare. Good food photography can be hugely enticing, A beautiful picture can get your visitors’ mouths watering, have them reaching for their telephones to book at your restaurant or to have you round at their house cooking them dinner. You can also use your website to show off your recipes and your technical skills. Recipes are great link bait to have on your website, attracting inbound links and visitors. You could also use videos to show of your skill. Perhaps you could have videos demonstrating knife skills or butchery. Many website builders will let you easily embed video in your website. Embedding these videos in both YouTube and in your website can help with your profile raising activity. You never know, you might even find yourself going viral!
Increase business
Now you’ve got your profile raised and shown off all of your amazing skills, this should translate into an increase in business. Many people visit restaurants because they are attracted to the head chef – perhaps they like a particular cooking style, or have been wowed by all of their amazing skills, or maybe the customer likes a chef’s ethos. Website traffic can easily translate into actual business. It’s just a matter of impressing your visitors on the web.
Don’t Miss Out
Finally, everybody else is doing it and if you aren’t you could be missing out. This important tool is being utilised by chefs the world over. This makes them easy to find, easy to access, and easy to learn about. If you don’t have a website, potential customers will be surfing the websites of your competitors – to them you don’t even exist.
