How do I set up my venue website?

Build your themed venue website with the Your website product — pick one of six site styles, switch pages and sections on, fill in short forms and publish. A short home page plus real pages (Menu, What's on, Gallery, About, Contact, Book, your own pages) inside the site's own header and footer, using the menu, events and hours saved in ResoFlow.

The Your website product (£15/month, or £150/year — two months free) gives your venue a professional themed website at your venue page. It works on any plan, or on its own. Choose a look, select your pages and add your text and photos using the built-in layouts. Your menu, events, opening hours and booking button use your ResoFlow data, so keeping those details up to date also keeps your website useful to guests. The product includes menu management too, so you can build the menu your site shows even on a plan without one — the Menu page, the customer menu page and the menu QR code all work while you own it.

Where everything lives

Once you own the product, the Your website page appears under Your venue in the sidebar (/dashboard/website). It's the whole editor: your pages, your sections, your look, and the publish switch. The very first time you open it, a short guided set-up walks you through three questions — choose your look, pick which sections your site shows, then publish now or save as a draft — and you can leave it at any point and drop into the ordinary editor (your answers are kept on this device). If you don't own the product yet, the same page carries your free venue page's choices (see What is my venue hub page?) alongside an explanation of the product and a link to Plans and products, where you can add it in a minute. While your paid site is still a draft, the free page is what customers see — so its style choices stay editable on this page until you publish.

Your Setup checklist includes a Build your website step — it deep-links straight to this page and ticks itself once your site is published (you can also tick it by hand).

Your first 30 days. The Your website page shows a Getting your website live card — a short checklist: Pick a look · Add your photos and about text · Preview it · Publish it · Put the address in your bios. Ticks appear only for the steps ResoFlow can see for itself (a look is saved, photos or about text exist, the site is published); the rest are reminders. The card hides itself once every checkable step is done, and the ✕ (Hide this checklist) hides it for you alone — it stays for anyone else who signs in.

How the site is laid out — a short home page plus real pages

Your website is a short home page plus real pages, each with its own address, all inside the site's own header and footer. Nothing scrolls on forever, and nothing sends a customer off to a page in a different style:

The site's header carries your logo and name, the page links, the sign-in icon, an Order button whenever any way of ordering is on, and Book now. The current page is underlined. The footer sits on every page — on phones it's two short columns (Visit: address, phone, a one-line summary of your hours · Explore: your pages and Book a table) plus one small line of secondary links (gift cards, waitlist, loyalty, my account, privacy) and your name and "Powered by ResoFlow"; on larger screens it's three columns. The closing "Book a table" band appears on Home, Menu and What's on only — never on Contact, Gallery or the Book page itself.

Choosing your look — six site styles

Under Choose your look the looks are grouped into six site styles, and picking one changes the whole site — the layout, the arrangement and the type, not just the colours:

Switching looks takes one click and keeps all your content. Each look has its own heading typeface, served from our own hosting (never from a third-party font service, so nothing about your visitors is shared with anyone); body text uses the device's own font, so pages stay quick. Under Accent colour you choose whether buttons and highlights use Your brand colour (from Settings → Branding) or The theme's own tuned accent. Spacing — Cosy, Standard or Airy — scales every gap on the site at once (sections, cards, the footer), so a site that feels spaced out tightens up with one click. Logo treatment decides how your logo sits in the site's header and footer — Round (the default circular chip), Soft square, or Free height for wordmark-shaped logos that shouldn't be cropped.

Your pages

The editor is a page list — each page is a row with a switch and a short form. Most sections also have a Section heading and Intro line you can rewrite; leave them blank and the theme's own wording is used.

Gallery photos

up to 12 photos from your image library. Every photo is shown whole, at its own shape — nothing is cropped: the home page shows the first six as a strip that scrolls sideways, and the Gallery page lays them all out in neat columns. Drag rows (or use the arrows) to reorder; each photo can carry a Label for the larger view (optional), shown only when a visitor opens the photo larger — never as a caption under it.

Add your own pages

The Add your own pages row lets you add up to 6 extra pages, each its own page with its own entry in the site's menu and its own address (made from the title — shown under the title in the editor): FAQs (question-and-answer rows), Private dining, Sunday menu, Jobs, or a fully Custom page. Each page has a title (leave it blank for a sensible default), an intro line, free text, an optional photo cropped to the wide box the page shows (the crop step draws the slice desktops see), and — for FAQs — up to 12 questions and answers. A page appears on your site once it has some text (or at least one answered question), and you can reorder, switch off or remove pages at any time.

Sections — the compact cards

The Sections row adds extra blocks to the home page. The booking card is the big card under the hero; the other blocks sit together as one row of compact cards — each an icon, a title, one line and a link — so switching more on never adds another strip. On phones the cards sit two across, and with three on the third spans the full width. Each one appears to customers only while its feature is genuinely available — a switched-on card whose feature lapses simply disappears rather than showing a dead button:

Two ordering handles need no switch at all. The Order button in the site's header (and "Order online" in the phone menu and footer) appears whenever any way of ordering is on — it opens the same ordering chooser your customer navigation uses. And when you take orders at the table, an Order to your table card joins the row: for a venue that only takes orders by scanning the code on the table it's informational ("scan the code on your table"); when your Flexible table entry setting accepts a typed table number, it's a real link into the which-table step.

Section order

The Section order row lets you drag the home page's sections into the order you want (or use the arrows). The hero always leads and the booking invitation always closes the page. The four compact cards move together as one row. Contact & hours and your own pages are pages in the site menu, not home-page sections, so they don't appear in this list. Sections with nothing to show simply don't appear — the order is kept for when they do.

On every device

The site is built phone-first: on smaller screens the header keeps your name, the Book now button and a menu button that opens a full-screen navigation (with "Order online" and "My account" inside it). Your logo (from Settings → Branding) appears in the header and footer when set; customers with a remembered sign-in see a filled person icon that opens their account.

When a page isn't available — you choose what shows

Every feature page tells you honestly whether customers can actually use it right now — for example, if online bookings are switched off, or your public menu is switched off. When something isn't available, you choose per page:

Preview any pages you change to check the notice or hidden-page choice works for your venue.

While your website is live, your look carries across every page your customers reach from it — the menu, events, gift cards, waitlist, tickets and the account area all render inside your site's header and footer and adopt your theme's fonts, colours and shapes, so the site never feels like it ends at the front page. With the dark looks (Modern Dark and Deco Brasserie), payment and booking screens keep a light background (still carrying your theme's fonts and accent) so the money steps stay easy to read.

Embedding the widget on another site — your allowed addresses

Already run a website elsewhere? You can embed the booking widget there — the embed code lives at Settings → Website widgets. The editor's Embed on another site row is where you list your own site addresses: once you add an address, the embedded widget only takes bookings on pages at those addresses and refuses anywhere else, so another site can never quietly embed your widget. Leave the list empty and embedding works anywhere (how it has always worked). You can list up to 10 addresses — just type the address as you'd say it (for example www.yourvenue.co.uk) and it's tidied automatically.

Writing ideas for your website

In the full website editor, Writing ideas offers editable examples for the opening line, your story, the longer About text and enabled non-FAQ custom page text. Choose a starter or write your own proposal, replace the placeholders and check the details for your venue. These are local examples; they do not use AI credits or verify your facts.

Confirm the exact wording before choosing Use this wording or Replace this field. This changes only that editor field. Review it, then use the normal Save and publishing controls when ready. If the field changes while you are writing, review its latest text and confirm your proposal again.

You can cancel and discard the writing proposal without replacing the existing field. Proposed text is not saved automatically or kept in browser storage. Leaving with unsaved writing opens the existing unsaved-changes flow; Save & exit asks you to review the proposal first. The examples are optional and do not appear in the free venue-page editor or the first-run setup.

Optional checks before publishing

Choose Check before publishing, beside Preview, for suggestions about practical information, photos, readability and links. The panel labels which draft it is reviewing, including unsaved edits. It also reads the relevant saved venue details; if a read fails, those details remain unverified.

Review in the editor opens the relevant section and keeps your draft. Use Run checks again after changing anything. Running checks does not save, rewrite or publish your website, and you can keep using Save, Discard and Publish as usual.

Use the existing phone and desktop previews to judge photo framing and sharpness. The checks do not test whether online links work or certify every colour over a photo, live booking availability or how the site looks on a physical device. Those remain part of your own preview before publishing.

Previewing and publishing

The status chip shows Live or Draft — with a count of how many of the six optional pages are on (for example "Live · 3 of 6 pages on") — so you always know what customers are seeing.

Editing a live site without the changes going live (drafts)

Once your site is published, your edits never go live by themselves — they wait as a draft until you publish them, so you can work on the site while customers carry on seeing the current version:

Both buttons sit beside the publish switch and appear only while a draft is waiting. While the site isn't published yet, saving still writes straight to the unpublished site — nothing is visible until you publish.

After you publish: point your other listings at it

Publishing is only half of going live. The address most of your customers actually reach you through isn't the new site — it's whatever link is sitting in your Google Business Profile, your Instagram bio and your Facebook page, and publishing here doesn't change any of them. Nobody arrives at a website nobody has been told about.

Once your site is live the editor shows a Now point your other listings at it card with your address and a copy button. Three places, in the order worth doing them:

These are all edited on Google, Instagram and Facebook themselves. ResoFlow can't change them for you and won't know when you have, so there's nothing to tick off here — do them in your own time.

Good to know

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