Cafes, bakeries and restaurants · Sydney
Most people looking for somewhere to eat are standing on the footpath holding a phone. They check your hours, look for the menu, and try to book. If any of those three is hard work, they go somewhere else.
What actually decides it
We have built sites for venues and sat with owners while they showed us where the bookings were going. It comes down to the same three every time.
Google shows your hours before it shows your website. When they are wrong someone walks to a closed door, and most people only do that once.
A photo of a printed menu is no good on a phone, and Google cannot read it either. Written as text it opens straight away and turns up in searches for the dish.
Nobody hears the phone during service. A booking form puts it in your inbox and you deal with it when you get a minute.
Three sample designs
We made these three up. None of them is a real business. Look at how they are put together rather than the colours. The roaster is a shop with a fixed sidebar, the bakery reads like a newspaper with a live stock board and a baking timetable, and the trattoria opens with a booking form and a timeline. Three structures, because three different businesses make money three different ways.
Coffee roaster · Leichhardt
A roaster sells coffee over the counter and beans by the kilo. So this one is built like a shop. The nav, hours and phone number sit in a fixed panel down the left, and the page itself is this week's roast, the bags and the wholesale enquiry.
Bakery and kitchen · Thirroul
This one sells out by early afternoon, so the whole page is about what is left and what bakes when. It is laid out like a newspaper front page, masthead and all, with a board showing what has already gone.
Trattoria · Haberfield
Open since 1987, and dinner bookings are the whole business. So the booking form is in the first screen next to the headline, and the history runs down the page as a timeline instead of hiding on an about page.
On booking systems
The platforms were built for large restaurants and they are priced for large restaurants. This is what they publish.
Taken from each platform's published pricing and public comparisons, September 2026. At around 500 covers a month an OpenTable style plan can come to roughly $899 once the per cover fees are added.
If you need floor plans, waitlists and a host stand, one of those platforms is worth paying for. If you just need people to be able to book without ringing you, it can sit in the website you already own and cost you once.
What it costs
$450once, main page plus one more
Most venues want a second page for the menu and leave it there. Anything past that gets quoted in writing first, so nothing turns up on a bill you have not seen.
Questions
Yes. A booking or availability calendar can be built into the site from $100, so a booking lands in your inbox instead of ringing a phone nobody can hear over the machine. There is no monthly platform fee and no charge per cover.
A Starter site is $450 and covers your main page plus one more, with your menu, your hours, a contact form and a Google Business Profile setup. Extra pages are $150 each. Bookings and galleries are quoted on top before anything is built.
Instagram reaches the people who already follow you. Google reaches the person standing on your street at 12.40pm deciding where to eat. Your Google listing and a simple site with your menu and hours is what wins that person, and Instagram cannot turn up in a search for cafe near me.
Yes. A care plan from $35 a month covers edits, hosting and keeping the site current, including menu changes and public holiday hours. You can also do it yourself and pay per edit batch instead.
Ready to start
Tell us your venue and your suburb and we will put a mockup of your site together. It costs nothing to look at, and there is nothing to sign after you have.
Get a free mockup