I’ve been hand crafting WordPress themes for restaurants since 2010, but I’ve never been more excited to introduce a theme than I am with Mise En Place. In French Mise En Place means “put in place” and carries the idea of a chef having everything they need in place before they begin cooking. My Mise En Place theme is designed with that same philosophy so that you will have what you need before you as you create your site.
This is our third WordPress theme to use the excellent Page Builder plugin. I spent weeks looking through dozens of WordPress page builders and found this one to be the best option. It works with widgets that all WordPress users already know how to use. On top of that simple foundation, it adds the ability to insert rows with columns of widgets into any page.
For Mise En Place that means you can easily create amazing looking menus that match your creativity. Want to recreate the home page of our Moonrise theme? You can do that. Want your contact page to have that same layout? You can make that happen too. Create as many pages with custom layouts as you want.
Mobile Friendly Design
More than most businesses, mobile is not optional for restaurants. Your customers will be searching for places to eat on their smartphones and your site must look amazing, communicate clearly and let them find you in order to gain their business.
Mise En Place is fully responsive so your content will work on small screens, large screens and ones in-between too.
WooCommerce Support
Want to add e-commerce support to your site? Mise En Place + WooCommerce are a great solution. When this excellent e-commerce plugin is activated additional options are unlocked for your restaurant to turn it into a highly capable e-commerce site.
You can create online ordering menus so your visitors can order take out right from their computers or phones. Want to sell your branded apparel through your website? You can create a “shop” section using WooCommerce and allow your visitors to make purchases and ship them to their homes. Offer catering? You can let catering orders make purchases online all with this great plugin. Need all three of those examples? You guessed it, you could create online ordering, an apparel shop and catering store all on the same site if you’d like to.
Simple flexibility is a goal I always strive for in creating WordPress themes and I believe Mise En Place hits that goal nicely. I hope you enjoy creating your next restaurant site with it 🙂
Jim Gavioli December 6, 2015
Bill, I’ll check out the plugin recommended above and your opinion on sliders is what I’ve suspected — sort of a ‘Banner Blindness’ now includes sliders – people conveniently ignore sliders if possible, although I find full page sliders, or ‘hero image’ sliders are almost impossible to ignore, and I actually like the look and effect a lot.
I’ll look into your ideas for ways to present daily specials — so many ways, and your custom widget makes sense. I’ll have to research. Again, Mise En Place looks like a home run.
Jim Gavioli December 3, 2015
Bill, very impressive features and just as impressive aesthetically! Love the Demo and can’t wait to install and see what it can do. Question – what are your thoughts on restaurants that want some sort of date/time picker Reservations feature? And while I’m picking your brain, do you have any thoughts on restaurant owners who want some way to prominently (i.e., above the fold)display daily Specials … that are simple for the owner to update and even configure in advance? For example, a chef knows his specials for the next two weeks and wants to configure some ‘slider’ or other menu that will display at the correct date/time for the special? Have you seen sites that succeed in doing this using a slider or some better method? Keenly interested in implementing such a ‘special’s feature on one or more of your themes.
Bill Robbins December 3, 2015
Hi Jim,
Glad to hear you like the theme. I’ve heard that the Restaurant Reservations plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/restaurant-reservations/) is a good solution there, but I haven’t tried it out yet.
There are lots of slider plugins out there. You may be able to use one of those to create something like that. I will say there is lots of usability evidence that shows users just ignore sliders. Some find them confusing, others associate them with advertising. If the content is important, you may want to place someplace other than a slider so that the greatest number of people possible see it.
You could also create a custom taxonomy for the food items that correspond with a day of the week for example. You could then code up a widget that has the menu items in that taxonomy appear on that day. Several years ago I did that in a site I coded out for a designer and I don’t think that was too tricky.
There might be something in the advertising plugin world too. Often ads are set for specific periods of time so I suspect there are some plugins that cater to that. It’s bit outside of my niches though so I don’t know for sure.
Thanks,
Bill