Top 5 RULES to Transform Your Catering Site

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's episode, I'm going to be reviewing a website by my caterer. So I've been using this guy for over 5 years for all the events that I do with my business, and he's provided some awesome food. And now he's launching his own website, and he asked me to give a testimonial and also wanted me to check it out and give him any comments or suggestions. So his name is Sinu, and let's go check out the site. So I came to Sinu after I was kind of left in the lurch from another catering company that last minute couldn't do something for me, and he filled in very quickly and was responsive. That was great. In terms of what I look for when looking for a caterer, the first thing is obviously the food. So it's great that you're showing a variety of the, the food that you offer here. It could be maybe a little bit more professionally designed. I don't know who did the design, but it's pretty good. You're leading in with the pictures, so it's good, you know, appetizing stuff that makes people want to learn a little bit more. The next thing is reliability. There's a lot of people who, you know, set up catering companies that aren't reliable and leave their clients hanging, like what happened to me. So especially for bigger companies who are potentially hiring you, they want to make sure that you're reliable, that you do everything on time. Learning a little bit more here, it says you're founded in the year 2010. I might here want to share a little bit more about what you do because we've been using you for, for over 5 years and provided awesome service. I know you've been doing this for a lot longer, so I may not say that you were just founded in the year 2010 and may say something about all the experience that you have as a chef, because this makes you seem really new, and then, you know, that may affect the reliability factor for a lot of companies. I see your vast clientele including private and public offices, government organizations, colleges, universities. That's great. I'd maybe put some logos on here to quickly show some of the clients who have hired you and have found that you have great service. Again, a lot of the companies are these little one-man shows and they don't provide great service and they don't deal with a lot of big companies. So that's who you have to kind of separate yourself from. So definitely put some of the logos in. I see here you have a testimonial from somebody from Sun Life. Great, you know, huge company. Put a Sun Life logo on here and, you know, show that you're working with some of these big companies. Let's take a quick look around here. Let's click on the about page. So again, founded in 2010. Now this is good. So our meals are prepared by our chef who has over 20 years of experience. Our chef leads our team. Our chef experience includes being in charge of kitchen, so many well-known fine dining restaurants and private catering companies. So what I would do here is say a little bit more about your story. So it's great you have 20 years of experience. I think this should be on the home page. You don't even need to show the year it was founded, just talk about your 20 years of experience. I'd show a picture here of you so you get people to know you. The more personal you can make your business, the better. So a big smiling Sinu picture here would be great. I'd put your name in here as well. And I'd also, if you've been the chef of some well-known fine dining restaurants, I'd show the names. So that, you know, people can recognize that and, you know, again, will make your company seem more reputable and easier to get them to want to contact you. So definitely just spruce this up a little bit. It's great that you have it, but I'd add a little bit more to it. Clicking on the menu, people are obviously going to go here, see what you have to offer. I don't know why you have a menu and an additional menu. That's maybe a little bit confusing for people. But anyway, you have the menu. What I try to do here is really take a picture of everything if possible. So you have, you have a picture here. I guess you have some more pictures here. It'd be great to see what, you know, what a small platter looks like, what a medium platter looks like, what a large platter looks like. This I found is one of the hardest things to determine when, when ordering food. I know we have a relationship now where it's, uh, I just kind of just tell you how many people and you create something awesome. But for new clients, it can be challenging to visualize what it is that you're going to be presenting and how it looks. So I would definitely take a picture of each of these so it's easier for clients to understand, and especially the ones that you don't have any pictures of here. So, you know, what does a breakfast sandwich plate look like? A breakfast platter? I think you're missing an R here, so sandwich platter, probably. So put a picture of each of one— each of these if you can. Next time you do it for clients, just take a small picture and pop it on up on the website and fix this. Spelling errors are not great, especially when dealing with bigger companies because they again want to find somebody who is reputable and reliable and professional, and having a spelling mistake doesn't look so good. So I definitely fixed that up quickly. You might want to just run this whole thing through a spell check too. Copy all the pages into Word and give it another quick look over to make sure that everything is spelled properly. If there's one thing off, there's probably a couple that are off. So going back up, you can order online, great. Testimonials are great, so again here, testimonials. Centennial College, that's good. You put mine here, so this is great. I've worked with Sandwich Garden for 5 years as a caterer for my company. They are always reliable, on time, makes great food, and takes pride in his work. I couldn't imagine my event without Sandwich Cart. So this is a little strange because there's grammar issues here. So they're always reliable, on time. This should be make great food and take pride in their work. So let's see what I actually wrote here. I've worked with Sina. Okay, so I talked about you, which makes sense, and you changed it to your name, which is fine. So just change this here to make great food and take pride in their work. Again, you don't want to have spelling and grammar mistakes on your website. They might think that either you wrote it down incorrectly or that I don't know how to speak English properly. But either way, it doesn't look good for either of us here, I guess, on this website. So especially being the second one up here, again, if somebody is actually reading this and they see grammar mistakes, then they may not think it's as reputable a company. So definitely go through your whole site, make sure all the spelling and grammar is correct before moving it to the next step. But overall pretty good, you know, the pictures speak volumes, they look appetizing, you know, I want to eat some of that broccoli right now. So definitely good job overall. I mean, the design could be a little bit better. I see here it says powered by J1-1 IT Solutions. In general, you shouldn't have this on your website unless they're paying you or you worked that out as part of your deal. You're promoting them and linking back to their site and they're probably not doing it for you. So I take that off unless you have some kind of arrangement initially in place to keep that on. So Sinu, hopefully that helped. Good luck with the site. For those of you who are watching, if you like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. It makes me want to do more of these free videos for you guys. And, uh, if you have a question about this website or your website, please leave a comment below. I always read those and try to get back to each one. So thank you, and we'll see you on the next episode.