Answers about getting started, your website, bookings and going online

The ones you already have. It all happens in your browser, in the same place you read your email, and we look after everything behind it for you. You answer questions about your place the way you'd answer them out loud, and your website is built from those answers. It's just like explaining your restaurant to a customer. Getting started is a short form, building and publishing are buttons, and every change after that is made by typing an ordinary sentence into the chat box. Every button says what it does, and everything on screen is in words you already use.

Three answers are enough to begin. We need your restaurant's name, the kind of food you do, and why people should come and eat with you. Your menu, your photographs, your opening hours, your logo and your web address all make the site better, and you can add any of them later.

AI does, working from your own answers about your own restaurant. It writes the pages, draws the photographs and designs the logos. That is what makes a homepage in minutes and a price of $9.99 a month possible. It also means you can start a page again whenever you want to. Building a page over uses one of the pages your plan covers that month, and any photographs made for it come out of that month's photographs. Those two are the only things counted. You look at every page and approve it before it goes onto your website, everything it writes is yours to change, and you can type in your own words wherever you'd rather write it yourself.

Under ten minutes from start to finish. The questions take about three minutes, and you only have to answer three of them to start. Your homepage is built while you wait, usually in a minute or two, and you look at it and approve it. On a paid plan, one press then builds the rest of the pages together to match it.

Send yours if you have them and we put each one where it belongs: thirty pictures for each restaurant on the paid plans, five on the free plan. We look at what is in each picture first, so your dining room lands in the room's place and your dishes land on the menu. Photographs you took yourself are always free to use, on every plan, and they are nothing to do with the monthly number below. Photographs made for your restaurant with AI come with a paid plan, and the free plan fills your homepage with ready-made photographs of your kind of food, so you can judge the finished page. The ones we make show your kind of food rather than your exact dishes, so for the dishes themselves send your own, phone photos included.

Yes. We draw you three from the answers you have already given. You get your name written out, a simple picture on its own, and a round badge. You can add one line to steer it if you want, like “our fishing boat” or “keep it green”, and you keep whichever you like. Ask for three more if you'd rather see other ideas. Your homepage is built first, because the logos are drawn on that page's own colour. Having one designed comes with a paid plan: 12 designs a month on Solo, 21 a month shared across all five restaurants on Pro, and 35 shared across all ten on Max. Each design is the three pictures above. If you already have a logo, upload it and we'll put it where it belongs, free on every plan including the free one.

There are two ways to do it. If your places share one website, add each location's address, phone and hours to the same site. If each place needs its own website, the top plan covers up to five, each with its own web address, its own bookings and its own sheet, plus one screen showing all of them at once.

A homepage, a menu, an about page and a contact page as standard. Beyond that you add whatever you like by typing its name, like a wine list, private dining, events, catering or a Christmas page, and we suggest the usual ones as buttons too. The buttons at the top of every page are kept up to date for you as you add and remove pages, so every button leads to a page that is really there. Pages past the homepage come with a paid plan, and each page you build counts as one of that month's pages. You get 12 a month on Solo, 40 a month shared across all five restaurants on Pro, and 70 shared across all ten on Max. The free plan builds your homepage, and you can have three goes at it a month.

That's the main way you use it, and it works like a chat. You type what you want in an ordinary sentence, like “we're shut on the 24th”, “put the Sunday roast on the front page” or “that price is wrong, it's $19 now”, and the change is made. If you'd rather point at something, press Change one part, click the bit of the page you mean, and only that bit changes while the rest of the page stays exactly as it is. Your menu has a quicker way of its own. Press Your food menu, photograph the new menu or send us the PDF, and we type out the dishes and the prices into a box for you to check first, because those are your prices and you should see them before they go on. One press then updates every part of every page that was showing the old menu, and no page is rebuilt. If your menu is showing in more than ten parts of your site, we save the new menu, leave those pages alone, count nothing against your month and tell you on screen.

Yes to both. Ask for a page to be written again and it comes back with fresh words and a fresh layout, in the same style as the rest of your site, because every page after the homepage is built to match the homepage you approved. Your homepage is the exception. Ask for that one again and it comes back with a new look as well. Every single change puts an Undo on the screen, and every earlier version of every page is kept, so you can go back to any of them at any time. The free plan gives you three goes at your homepage each month for that reason, plus eight changes a month for the smaller fixes. Undo and going back to an earlier version are always free.

Yes. Your published website fits a phone screen properly, and the Google and AI check looks at exactly that before you publish, alongside everything else that helps people find you. You can use the builder itself anywhere. It is easiest on a laptop or a tablet, where you see the page you're changing next to what you're typing, and on a phone you can fix a price, add a closure or read tonight's bookings, which is most of what you do after the first week. The booking sheet in particular is made for a phone, because that is where it gets used.

Your contact page gives a customer your phone number, your email address and where to find you. If they want to write something down, the notes box on a table booking is the message that really reaches you. We leave the form itself off on purpose. Your website is a set of finished pages with nothing running behind them, so a form on one of them would collect nothing, and a form that says “thank you, your message has been sent” when nothing was sent tells your customer something untrue. We would rather give them a number they can ring.

Yes. Put them in with the rest of your answers and your site is built in your colours. Whatever you choose, we check that the writing on top of them stays easy to read. Leave the box empty and we'll choose colours that suit your kind of food.

It appears on your booking sheet the moment it's made. The sheet is a page you open on your phone, and it shows tonight's guests, who's next through the door, how full your busiest time is, and every booking for the week. You move a table to Confirmed, Seated, Finished, Missed or Cancelled from a small menu, and it takes two taps rather than one, so you cannot change a booking by brushing the screen in the middle of service. Tap a guest's phone number and it dials them.

Your guest sees the booking confirmed on the screen straight away, with a short code they can read out to you over the phone and a link of their own that lets them change or cancel it. The booking lands on your sheet immediately either way. We don't send emails or text messages to guests at the moment, so that screen and that link are how a guest keeps hold of their table.

We count your free seats in one place, at the moment each booking is made, so the table a guest books is theirs. We count seats rather than tables, which is how a restaurant really fills up, and each booking holds its seats for the whole sitting, so a table booked for two hours belongs to that party for the full two hours.

There are two ways to handle it. You can hold every booking for your own approval rather than confirming it automatically, which covers most of what a deposit is there for. And if you want a real deposit, connect SimplyBook.me and we'll put their booking page on your site, because deposits and stricter rules are what they do. Our own booking page handles no money and asks for no card details.

The sheet holds the bookings that came in through your website, and you move each of those between Confirmed, Seated, Finished, Missed and Cancelled as the night goes on. Typing in a walk-in yourself is something we haven't built yet. It is a sheet of the tables people booked, rather than a plan of your whole room.

Keep them. Paste your booking page link and we'll put it on your site so it looks like part of it. Your bookings stay with them, so you carry on managing them where you already do, and the sheet here tells you on screen that that is where they are. Our own booking system is there whenever you want it, and with it you can take as many bookings a month as your tables allow.

They sit behind your login, and that is the only place they are. Your published website carries none of them. The “been here before” counts are worked out from your own bookings each time you look, so everything you see about a guest comes from your own restaurant and nowhere else. Your bookings are kept for as long as your website exists.

Yes, on any paid plan, and it stays registered in your name where it is. Type it in and we tell you exactly which box to fill in where you bought it, in that company's own words for its own boxes, with a link straight to the right page. The big providers are covered by name, including GoDaddy, Namecheap, IONOS, one.com and more.

We check your email settings first, because this is the part worth being careful about. The simple way of connecting an address leaves your email exactly where it is. The thorough way, where we look after the address for you, can move where your email is delivered, so before anything changes we read what your address is doing today, put everything to do with email at the top of the list, and show it to you. You approve that list before a single thing moves.

We suggest addresses built from your name, your food and your town, check which ones are still available, and hand you over to a registrar to buy the one you want. You pay them, not us, and it's registered in your name. Endings on offer include .com, .co.uk, .uk, .nl, .restaurant, .cafe and .co. Then you come back and connect it like any other.

Your site goes online at a web address we give you, set up in one press with the padlock, and it keeps working after you connect an address of your own. Hosting and the padlock are both part of the price on every paid plan, and we keep them up for you. The padlock in the address bar is set up on your own address as well as on the one we give you, and it renews itself.

Your pages are finished files, kept on a network with copies around the world, so the copy that reaches a customer comes from one near them and opens straight away. Your photographs are shrunk and converted for you when you upload them, so a page full of pictures still opens quickly on a phone.

Yes, in one press. All your pages are kept exactly as they are, and one more press puts the site back online whenever you like.

Your website stays online. It keeps taking bookings and your web address keeps working. Your account goes back to what the free plan includes, so you can still make a few changes each month, and publishing, new pages, logo designs and new photographs all come back as soon as the payment is sorted.

Yes. You buy it from a registrar directly and it is registered to you, not to us. You pay them with your own card and you hold the registration, so you can move your address wherever you like whenever you like. Your bookings and everything you told us stay yours as well, and they are kept for as long as your website exists.