When Gordon Ramsay goes around fixing failing restaurants in TV’s “Ramsay’s kitchen nightmares”, there are some themes that keep popping up again and again, that you’ll need to follow if you want that successful restaurant… A website is a lot like a restaurant, customers come and go, if you don’t deliver something quality of good value they’ll f*ck off.

So here are some top Ramsay tips, interpreted for website owners & builders:

Use locally sourced, seasonal ingredients.

Got a restaurant near the sea? Then why the f*ck isn’t Mackerel on the Menu? Got a website in the fashion sector then why haven’t you got any industry pundit blogs, community forums, or key fashion news?

Your website should extend into its’ habitat, touching those people, places, issues and events that make up your websites audience’s world. These are the true ingredients of your site, not the programming language its written in.

Simple not overly complex food.

If you look at the successes of flickr, youtube, basecamp, they all are have strong key functions, and often don’t do more than you expect, nor have complicated GUI. Keep it simple. Just like my www.spendamillion.com site. People like it when your site has obvious simple uses.

Swear a lot at your team

I tried this on Andy my colleague in a web firm in Bath, England. “For f*cks sake Andy, your CSS is referring to the a non-existent image that’s why it’s not appearing”

“F*ck off you c*nt, at least my last website didn’t have a table in it. Cock”.

I think I’ll leave that one to Gordon, then. I guess the lesson is to be honest with your colleagues, else you’ll all hide behind facades, and the true website vision and wont shine through, and you’ll be unhappy.

Customers, customers, customers

You can have a 3 star Michelin chef, but if the bums aren’t on seats, you’ll be burning several grand a week. Go out ask your target customers what they want out of a website like yours. Go to forums, ask your friends, ask their friends, ask strangers on buses. Start working to what they want, and surely enough, people will come to your website.

Hey, building up a mailing list, an intelligent Adwords campaign and smart SEO always helps too.

Smarten the place up a bit

Out with the dated décor, or stuffy environments, clean white walls, inviting exterior and smiling service staff will make your restaurant run smoothly. Same with your website: cut all that junk on your homepage, have speedy online customer service, and shiny crisp photos and text. You’ll make a website that is an enjoyable, sticky, repeat-vistable experience.

PR Stunts work, use them

Every week Ramsay does a “campaign for real gravy”, “invite of the local dignitaries” or “drag in the local z-list celebs”, and it fills the restaurant gets the desired PR and voila, kick starts the business.

What are you afraid of with PR and your website? Come up with big ideas, and go pester them newspapers and local radio stations and big clients. You never know you may even put PR as a central tenet of your business, and it may even work, and you’ll have lost nothing.

Good luck with your website.. Paolo Di Terlizzi

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