Creating an attractive and readable menu is crucial for the successful promotion of your restaurant. A sophisticated menu design will boost your public image and increase the traffic of visitors to your venue. Fortunately, there are plenty of menu templates available online, both Google Docs and Word templates, to make the task easier for you.
Our purpose in this article is to show how you can design a menu that will better attract your potential clientele and be easy to navigate. We shall also describe a variety of templates that will help you achieve those goals more effectively.
Designing an Attractive Menu
Effectively, your restaurant’s menu is similar to your post on a social media platform. If people like what they see, they will want to know more about it; otherwise, you have lost them. Therefore, your first and most important objective should be to create a design that will catch the eye.
There are several technological tools you can use to achieve that effect:
1. Use visual and gripping formats to make your menu more exciting and easier to read. Instead of writing monotonous texts and lists that the readers have to think of, you can use various beautiful fonts and colours to draw attention to short and easy descriptions inside the decorative patterns.
2. Include lots of photos and even videos to let people see the items on your menu and the interior design of your venue. Pictures are easier to understand than words, and a photograph of a dish is more likely to make you want to taste it than any amount of words ever will. Besides, videos and pictures are more entertaining and produce more positive emotions.
3. At the same time, you should keep the overall design of the menu as simple as possible. The problem with excessive ornamentation is that it easily distracts the readers from the relevant content and can even overwhelm them in some cases.
Creating a Readable Menu
In our day and age of online shopping, your potential customers will, most probably, discover your menu on the internet first. Provided the menu looks attractive enough for them to want to read it, your next objective is to make it easy to navigate as well. You can achieve that by:
- Customising the colours, fonts and icons to make all pages resemble each other
- Creating a seamless navigation experience for the readers in which they always know where they are
- Providing intelligent and easy search by several criteria, including the prices, category of dishes and additional options, like specific ingredients and special offers
- Designing an attractive and user-friendly navigation bar to let the readers move across the pages quickly and always be able to return to the main page
- Including live chat so that your customers can always contact your support team or a chatbot if they feel confused or have some particular questions to ask
Using Google Docs Menu Templates
Designing a menu that will serve its purpose well requires a lot of artistic skill and thorough mastery of numerous technological tools, and that is where menu templates come in quite handy. Besides, there is such an immense variety of them online these days that you can select the best ones for your particular needs and focus on other tasks instead.
Cuisine Templates
You can select the most appropriate templates for the type of food you serve in your restaurant, browsing this category by the national cuisine or the sections of your menu, like starters or desserts. The drag-and-drop format feature will enable you to place corresponding pictures next to the dishes and replace them when necessary.
Bar Templates
You can also obtain templates specifically for your wine menu or the cocktail cards on the bar. The visual presentation of the items will correspond to the particular atmosphere of the type of venue in question.
Catering Templates
Alternatively, there are plenty of Word templates designed specifically for catering companies. They focus on the specific catering services you provide and structure the event for your customers’ convenience. Furthermore, you can select templates for special occasions, like Christmas celebrations, weddings and birthday parties.
Pros of Using Menu Templates
There are definite advantages of using those templates instead of drawing the menu manually:
- Outsourcing the designer work to the professionals who can do the job a lot better
- Saving time and effort to concentrate on other tasks
- Meeting SEO requirements more effectively since most templates serve that purpose as well
Conclusion
The main objectives in designing a menu are to make it visually gripping, appropriate for your target audience, intelligible and easy to navigate. You can acquire the skills required for the job, hire professional designers or obtain relevant templates to execute the task more effectively. Should you choose the latter, the good news is, you can find plenty of them on the internet, and free of charge too.