If you have never worked in the international hotel industry you will be faced with many things you might not have considered or imagined. The hotel business is highly competitive and achieving good financial results is not as easy as it seems.

In my experience in dealing with entrepreneurs and investors I have found that there is no shortage of creative ideas for innovative hotel concepts. The challenge however, lies more in the strategic and organizational areas of the business.

It will be extremely important you prepare yourself well, do a lot of research and develop a detailed business plan to ensure success. Unfortunately I still see too many start-up hotels fail due to little planning. In my previous articles.

In our next few blog articles we will be covering various important aspects and steps of how to start your own hotel business. We will focus on:

• Remarkable Hotel Concepts
• Hotel Business Plan
• Market Research
• Securing Investment
• Site Selection
• Permits and Licenses
• Hotel Pre-Opening Phase
• Staff Recruitment
• The Opening
• Managing the place
• The Best Hotel WordPress Theme

We hope these tips will help fellow entrepreneurs start a successful new hotel business! Please contact us if you need some help with writing a solid hotel business plan.

Would you like to know more about hotel revenue management? Xotels is a hotel management company that assists independent hotels to outperform their competition and become market leaders.

So, you may want to build a custom website for restaurant but wait this can prove to be very expensive.

What I would suggest you is, try these awesome responsive free restaurant WordPress themes that I am going to list in this article. Without investing a cent, I guarantee you that you can create a restaurant website which looks as if thousands of dollar was invested upon it. ???? I am not kidding, just visit the below themes and you will know it for yourself.

Again this is hand-held devices era, simply put, era where mobile phone is one of the basic needs of life. In my opinion, mobile devices have made us all people crazy but that’s a totally different topic that I may discuss some another day. ???? People will indeed be searching for restaurants more often in a mobile. So, if you are a restaurant owner make sure your site is responsive so every pages in your website is displayed beautiful in a well aligned manner. Make sure all information is readable and view-able in mobile. Good news is that all restaurant based WordPress templates that I have listed below are responsive as well.

If you have a good restaurant website then it is likely the website will bring the potential customers right to your restaurant table in front of you. He/she will eat the food that you offer and you will make more money. Sounds interesting? Okay then let’s do it. Trying to make online presence for your website can really be tough but if you select nice WordPress theme then this should not be so hard. Believe me! So here it begins.. the list of awesome, amazing, clean, free restaurant WordPress themes.

1. WordPress Restaurant Theme – Resca

This friendly, welcoming theme comes loaded with customizable options and is a great fit for restaurants, coffee shops, and other dining establishments.

Resca’s smooth parallax scrolling experience will make navigating your website a joy for your customers, with dynamic text and hundreds of color, font and icon options available for you to pick out the look that best represents your business. Building a menu for your restaurant – complete with vivid photographs of dishes, seasonal menus, daily specials, as well as accompanying drinks menus or suggested wine pairings – is easy. Your customers will be able to book reservations for dinner directly on your website thanks to integration with OpenTable, the most popular restaurant booking plugin available. A well-designed blog enables you to keep customers up to date with new recipes on the menu, special themed dining evenings, and whatever other goings-on you feel like sharing.

One unique feature designed just for this theme is the inclusion of an events calendar, which is perfect for your establishment if you offer cooking courses or feature live music or other entertainment. It even includes a countdown clock so your customers know exactly how much time they have left to purchase a ticket! And as you would expect, more typical functionality – such as compatibility with the WooCommerce plugin to meet any e-commerce needs you may have – is present too.

Resca is the ideal theme choice for the multifaceted dining establishment that does more than just serve food or drinks.

2. Restaurant WordPress Theme | NEM

No matter if you are a large luxurious restaurant, a café shop, a bakery or an online food delivering business selling pizza, pasta or cheeseburger, NEM will fully meet your expectations and give your customers a brand new experience with great and beautifully made features.

Just imagine how your wonderful your brand’s website would be with Unlimited Color skin and theme combination, Parallax and Responsive design, Elegant recipe list, Revolution Sliders for restaurant introduction or promotion campaign, Online booking and reservation and so on.

FoodHunt
FoodHunt theme comes with big full screen image slider. Add a mouth watering recipe image that your restaurant prepares, image of your restaurant’s pleasant environment, stock of your food ingredient or anything that you like. It’s your website what to keep right upfront in the home page is your choice, I am just giving you the idea. ????

FoodHunt supports almost everything that you need to run a successful Restaurant business. Origin story, Services, Staffs, Blog, Gallery, Contact page, there are options to setup everything of these. You can show all of these right in the home page. On top of this, FoodHunt beautifully integrates with RestaurantPress plugin and help you to create different types of menu sets. You can configure menu sets like Vegetarian and Non-vegetarian, sets for Appetizers, Dinner, Launch, Starters, Main Course anything you like. It is all made simple and beautiful.

Dyad

Dyad is by Automattic. So, as for the coding standards and security is concerned, themes by Automattic are the best ones in the world in this matter. Moving to the design, the demo speaks for itself. It is very clean, amazing and well thought of. Actually, I am blown away by this theme’s design, using just the default posts that WordPress offers anybody could create such a wonderful restaurant WordPress theme.

Dyad is minimal and hassle free. The beautiful aspects of Dyad are: it is well balanced and super clean, makes beautiful use of typography and white spaces, and you can highlight some of your posts as slider.

Dyad displays words and images in perfect balance: a post’s featured image and text excerpt get equal billing on the main blog page, while single posts and pages size and position images dynamically, depending on the screen size. The homepage shows a series of Featured Content with a large Featured Image.

Canapé

Yet another amazing Restaurant theme by Automattic. Canapé is a refined theme designed for restaurants and food-related businesses seeking a classic, elegant look. Showcase your food and drink menu, while integrating the OpenTable widget to offer easy online reservations.

The Canapé theme’s front page template presents a targeted welcome page for your visitors, offering full-width featured images, a featured menu items section, and three widget areas.

The Canapé theme is responsive, providing an adapted and delightful reading experience across all devices, giving viewers easy access to the most important information about your business. You will want to start by placing a featured image and persuasive message on your home page, and building your menu of dishes or products.

Bistro

Bistro is the child theme of Sydney theme. In case, you don’t what a child theme means please visit this article to learn more on this. Sydney is one of the most popular, powerful, complete, beautiful theme of our time. The Bistro theme is built over this solid Sydney theme. So, brings all the goodies of it’s parent theme and on top of that enhances the theme to bring out a theme that is best suited for Restaurant owners.

Bistro has built-in support for the Restaurant plugin so you can easily create your menus. The theme is cross browser compatible and support Chrome, Safari, Firefox, IE9+ and Opera.

Receptar

Receptar is simple, modern, responsive, high-DPI, fully customizable, stylish restaurant WordPress theme. It features split-screen book-like design inspired by a modern cook book with emphasize on beautiful imagery and typography.

Receptar is truly a piece of art and flawless. Once you setup featured image for all your posts, the theme will look breathtakingly majestic. You will love your site for how professional and beautiful it will look. The menu icon is placed at the top-side of the screen giving a full image to make direct and awesome impression on your visitors. Menu icon is followed by social icons that will help you connect with your social profiles. This can indeed prove to be a game changer to uplift your restaurant business.

Supports Beaver Builder page builder and Jetpack plugin, Schema.org markup, Theme Hook Alliance action hooks, translation-ready code, front page slideshow, customizable colors, and other cool features. The theme is compatible with Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer 9+ browsers.

Brasserie

One of the highlighted features of Brasserie is, it integrates beautifully with WooCommerce to setup an online stores that helps to sell the delicious recipes. About the design, Brasserie has striking design, clean layout, mobile friendly and makes great use of white space. Brasserie comes with great support too.

Brasserie is a full-width, fully responsive and highly customizable free restaurant WordPress Theme. Add your own logo, header, google fonts, featured areas, social media links and much more. This versatile theme also has several different layouts, unlimited colors, google font options. Brasserie looks great on devices of all sizes.

Before becoming a blogger, I was a part of a web development company that created two crowdfunding platforms for clients. I know what it’s like on the coding side and have a good amount of experience helping creators.

From my research, I’ve complied a list of websites, tools, and open source frameworks below that can help you create a crowdfunding platform. The coding ability required to implement these solutions may vary.

White-Label Crowdfunding Platforms

– Launcht: Launcht is one of the best known white-label crowdfunding platforms out there. They are based in Boston, MA and help customers create crowdfunding platforms for nonprofits, universities, startups, and more. Pricing information: Setup – $495-$5,995. Ongoing – $295/mo & 1% of all funds raised – $495/mo & 1% of all funds raised.

– Invested.In: “Fully customizable. Trusted and used by some of the largest brands and names on the planet. It’s super-simple. We’ll help you set up.” Prices range from $345.90-$995.90 per month. There is also an enterprise tier where Invest.In will help with coding/design work.

– CrowdValley: “Configure and launch your own crowdfunding, peer-to-peer marketplace, or online investment portal. Plug in services and APIs for investor accreditation, escrow accounts, due diligence, regulatory compliance, and financial back office.” Prices range from $99-$1,499 per month.

– CrowdfundHQ: “The fastest, easiest way to create a successful crowdfunding site. No coding required. Best pricing in the industry.” Prices range from $60-$200 per month.

– Towema: “The easiest way to launch a personalized crowdfunding platform.” Prices range from $500-$1,500 per month.

– CrowdForce: “DealRoom: crowdfinancing connects investors and issuers.
CrowdForce: rewards crowdfunding for business or nonprofits.” Pricing information: pending.

Open Source Crowdfunding Platforms

– Catarse: Catarse is an open source crowdfunding platform that was created in Brazil. Judging from the last time I used the code base, it will require a good amount of manipulation and bug fixing if you’d like to use it to create a crowdfunding site. It’s easiest to set up with PayPal. Once you do get it working to your needs, it’s awesome and performs the job well. You can see it in action here.

– Spot.us (Crowdfunded Reporting): Spot.us is a community funded reporting platform. There is also an open-source version on github. It uses the Ruby on Rails framework.

For more, see seeing factory’s blog, where there is a good list of open source crowdfunding platforms.

WordPress Themes for a Crowdfunding Platform

• Charity WP is an expertly designed and seriously effective, modern and resourceful, highly responsive WordPress multipurpose charity and nonprofit organization website theme. Charity has been crafted by an experienced team of talented developers working together to design an incredible solution for all sorts of charitable projects and nonprofit organizations and their endeavors. Whether you are putting together a charitable ball or gala, any sort of fundraising event, or managing an ongoing charity, Charity is the theme for you. This Charity WordPress Theme is made by ThimPressNonprofit organizations will also find in Charity a sound ally in all their pursuits, with Charity’s features being solely thought out to solve every problem a charity or nonprofit may encounter, from sophisticated, modern subscription newsletters with ample features to engage your donor base, an entirely functional out of the box system for creating and promoting your donation campaigns, charity drives and causes individually, a powerful donation system built right into Charity to ease your donor’s user experience while contributing to your cause, nonprofit event options, automated calls for volunteers, predesigned Mission and Vision pages, and so much more, you’d never hear the end of it. Charity is a resourceful and thorough package, equipped with a strong set of tools to get your charitable work done, today!
• Ignition Deck: Ignition Deck is a popular wordpress crowdfunding plugin and crowdfunding theme. Pricing ranges from $79-$349. Extensions include WePay, Amazon Payments, and MixPanel Analytics.
• Fundify: Fundify is a wordpress crowdfunding theme by the popular theme marketplace, ThemeForest. It costs $60, integrates with WePay and PayPal, and supports flexible and fixed fundraising options.
• FundingPress: FundingPress is another theme created by ThemeForest that you can use to create a crowdfunding platform. It costs $55 and has a bit of a different layout than Fundify.
• CrowdPress: CrowdPress is another wordpress crowdfunding theme on the ThemeForest marketplace. It costs $45 and uses PayPal as a payment method.
• Campaignify – Another wordpress theme, Campaignify offers a bit of a different layout than the other “build your own crowdfunding platform” themes on the website. it costs $55.
• Franklin: Franklin is a premium wordpress theme in the ThemeForest marketplace. Personally, I like the design. It costs $45.
• Mission theme: This theme is good for donation based crowdfunding websites. It costs $45 and is more geared towards charities and nonprofits.
• Funder WordPress Theme: Another crowdfunding platform theme in the ThemeForest marketplace. It costs $45.

I couldn’t find any Drupal themes/extensions to help with creating a crowdfunding platform, and only one resource for Joomla developers looking to create a platform. If you know of any, then please leave a comment below.

Self-Funding Crowdfunding Platforms

– Self-starter.us: “Selfstarter is an open source starting point for building your own ad-hoc crowdfunding site. It was put together by Lockitron after they were turned down from Kickstarter.”

– CrowdtiltOpen: “Launch your own crowdfunding platform without touching a line of code.” CrowdtiltOpen was launched by Crowdtilt.

For more, see the “continue fundraising” section of 22 websites to help post-kickstarter with reward fulfillment and product sales.

Deciding to launch a crowdfunding platform?

Be sure to publish a free press release through CrowdfundingPR.org and leave a comment below if you have any questions about the links I’ve included in this article. If you found this article to be helpful, leave a comment below and let me know!

In addition, I highly recommend checking out our other article on how to get projects for your crowdfunding platform.

So how does a charity get the most out of its website? It needs to let users find out information about the charity, but the main objective of the site is to get people involved with the charity, usually resulting in the user donating money.

In this article, we look at 8 principles that you should follow when creating a charity website.

WHAT MAKES A GOOD CHARITY WEBSITE?

1. A MISSION

A quick tagline to sum up what the charity (or charitable event) is about.

2. HOW SPONSORS WILL BE HELPING

Let your users know what you do with their money once they sponsor. They’ll want to know how they’re making a difference to someone’s life.

3. PHOTOS OF PEOPLE THE SPONSORS WILL BE HELPING

Help users identify and visualize the people they’ll be helping.

4. DONATE BUTTON

The donate button is most likely the most important asset of a charity website so it should be prominent and obvious. This is the ultimate end goal for users.

5. DONATIONS TO DATE

If the website is for a specific charitable event, show how much the charity’s raised to date. Current sponsors get to see how useful they’ve been while possible sponsors can see that there are other people already helping and the campaign is active.

6. A FUNDING GOAL

If applicable, share your goal. Having a target gives people something to aim for.

7. KEEP IN TOUCH

Sponsors will want you to keep in touch as they now have a vested interested, so make sure they can. Let people sign up and send them an occasional newsletter about what the charity is up to. This will also be helpful when it comes to looking for future donations.

8. HOW CAN PEOPLE HELP

Donating money is the obvious way people can help, but make it clear they can help in other ways. Suggest fundraising ideas and advise how users can help promote the website and charity via other social networking sites.

9. USE A BEAUTIFUL CHARITY WORDPRESS THEME

Just fulfilling all the above functions isn’t enough. How beautiful your website is should also be considered as a pre-requisite. Charity WP is a Charity WordPress Theme that can do this part for you. It has all the great plugins and all the great design a Non-profit website should have.

Build a stable Crowdfunding WordPress Website

The first step is always easiest – Build a website. To do this, you can choose from downloading free themes on the Internet, or downloading pre-built Premium themes, or hiring your people building your site.

The optimal solution is to choose one of the best Charity WordPress Theme to do this. Because you will both:

• Save your time
• Save your money

Everything is already pre-made for you, so all you need to do was just making content and sending your website to your friends.

Run Crowdfunding Campaigns On Your Website

It should come as no surprise that MakeUseOf runs regular crowdfunding articles. The ease with which it is possible to back interesting new projects – the majority of which would never get off the ground a few years ago – is exciting for many, offering the chance to put someone’s dream into action with a small pre-sale contribution that might grab you a credit or a copy of the item being produced (depending on the project of course). Able to contribute more? Then your reward will be greater once the project has completed (remember that not all crowdfunding projects make it to the end).

This is the beauty of crowdfunding, the collaborative finance system made possible by the Web.

Contrary to perceived wisdom. However, you don’t need to spend time setting up a page on Indiegogo, Kickstarter or any of the successful crowdfunding websites, or paying the fees for a successful campaign (for instance, Kickstarter charges 5%).

There are particular types of project that you can set up and attract funding for using just a page on your website, with arguably greater ease than on a well-known crowdfunding site.

Assessing Demand

What is the topic of your blog or website? Do you have a large, regular readership?

There are several ways you can spin off products that your readers might be interested in buying. Books, comics and magazines, movies, even CDs and t-shirts can be custom made and sold through your website. Naturally, some of these will involve a lot more work than others, but those that are easier to produce will make nice benefits when you launch your campaign.
Assessing demand for your crowdfunded project can be difficult. It mostly depends on your readers’ passion and the nature of the product. If for example, you’re a tech website launching a new app or device, with backing required for mass production or promotion, you’ll probably find that with loyal readers you can attract enough interest to start crowdfunding.

Similarly, any site with a burgeoning newsletter subscription list can leverage this following to its crowdfunding benefit.

On the other hand, if your niche is less cerebral and doesn’t add any real value to your reader’s everyday web browsing, raising the funds for your campaign may prove difficult (and the same will be true of launching the campaign on a mainstream crowdfunding site).

Researching Price, Offering Bonuses and Benefits

One of the most important aspects of any crowdfunded campaign is the amount of money you need to raise to make the project a reality.

To get this crucial figure ready, you should spend as much time as possible researching every aspect of the production of your project. Then – and only then – should you consider speaking to your team (assuming you’re not going it alone) about what benefits and bonuses might be available for backers who pledge more than the standard amount.

You might, for instance, have an artist working on your project, one who can isolate some images and use them for t-shirts. A fundamental contribution of $1 for early access to the finished product might then be stepped up to $20 for early access plus a t-shirt.

If you’re short of ideas for coming up with bonus benefits, using brainstorming or mind-mapping websites and techniques should help.

Promoting Your Crowdfunding Campaign

There are several ways in which you can support any crowdfunding campaign, and these methods are just as important when the project is being hosted on your site.
Facebook and Twitter accounts, pages and groups are vital to the success of your campaign, but so are regular updates. For the best results, you should have a dedicated category on your website for the project so that all updates are easy to find.

If your site has a podcast then you should use this to help promote the campaign, while networks that you are already involved with (perhaps online groups, forums, even LinkedIn) are also good ways to spread the word, and even find people to help contribute to the project if there are any openings.

The most important aspect of promotion, however, is that it should be constant. Don’t stop. Make it a daily task to find new people who might contribute.

Case Study: One Website, Three Successful Campaigns

Everything being shared here is based on my experiences managing three print projects on my website.

In 2010, I launched a crowdfunded/pre-order campaign to fund the printing of a book, Ultimate Regeneration (now available on Amazon). The initial sale price was much lower than that currently found on Amazon, and the target for funding the printing was achieved within a couple of weeks.

Summer 2012 saw me tied up with a second project, a limited edition charity comic book that was funded in the same way, with all profits going to charity.

In late 2013, I set up yet another crowdfunding project. Consisting of another limited edition graphic novel as the primary product with a version including additional exclusive content and a t-shirt for those wanting to pay more, this is also a project where the profits will be donated to a prominent charity.

Every tactic and concept described above have been used in the planning, launch, and execution of these projects, which have all met their production costs and proved successful. All you need to do to take payment is set up a payment button — PayPal is an attractive option in these circumstances. If you run a blog, then you might also consider an e-commerce plugin.

The Takeaway: Have A Successful Website? You Don’t Need Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Etc.

As you can see, with a successful website and a loyal, passionate audience you don’t need to rely on established crowdfunding services. The risks of sending your readers off to another site unnecessarily are evident – managing your crowdfunding project from the comfort of a recognised online presence is a great way to keep everything familiar and in-house.

To summarise:

• Research the project entirely cost everything.
• Utilise your audience and community.
• Save money and focus interest by hosting the crowdsourced fundraiser on your website.
• Use your existing social streams and relationships to generate interest.

However you plan to proceed, we wish you well and hope that it culminates with the successful completion of your project.

Have you used a crowdfunding service only to be disappointed with the results? Would you consider raising funds for your project from your website rather than a crowdfunding site?

Let us know your thoughts!

The discussion in this forum section should solely serve the purpose of building a Charity, volunteering website.

The main CMS we are using is WordPress, and the best Charity WordPress Theme for this field is Charity WP.

Feel free to give us your thought.

High-Quality Food

A good restaurant sets a high standard for its food quality and ensures that guests receive the same quality with every meal. Serving quality food can earn your restaurant a good reputation and compel your guests to return for repeat visits.

High-quality ingredients and an experienced cook are important to serving good food consistently. A good cook understands your guests’ needs and works well with the kitchen staff to ensure that guests receive their meal the way they ordered it every time.

Good Overall Experience

Providing good customer service in a clean environment helps to enhance your guests’ overall experience of your restaurant. The staff who interact with your guests should be courteous and maintain a positive attitude. Servers should know the menu well, deliver guests’ food and drinks on time, and quickly address any issues that an unsatisfied guest may have.

All staff should help to keep the restaurant clean at all times, including the kitchen, food preparation areas and any areas that guests come into contact with.

Different from the Rest

If your restaurant provides good food and service but is too similar to other restaurants, customers may overlook your restaurant when deciding where to dine.

A good restaurant should have one or more unique features that stand out in a customer’s mind and give it a competitive advantage over others. For example, your restaurant may be the only restaurant in town that makes its ingredients fresh daily or it may have an amazing view of the city that none of your competitors have.

To make your restaurant different from the rest, one simple trick you can do is to make a great website with it. Some websites used these WordPress theme and made extra-ordinary impacts:

• Restaurant WordPress Theme | NEM 

• WordPress Restaurant Theme – Resca

Good Business Management

A good restaurant owner manages the business aspect of the restaurant properly, which increases the chances that it can provide quality food and service without interruption. Running your restaurant properly can also help boost your small business’s profits.

You must manage your restaurant’s finances, keep good records and stay current with regulatory requirements, such as taxes and health inspections. For example, consistently paying your vendors on time reduces the risk of running out of items on your menu.

An oft-overlooked aspect of opening a smaller hotel is your product distribution, or how you market yourself. Because you don’t have that existing brand recognition of the larger chains, you need to get the word out there about your resort. By defining your resort as a brand of one and communicating your standards in the same way that larger resorts do, your customers will gain a level of comfort and familiarity with your resort. Telling a unique story behind the location or history of the hotel (for The Chelsea, it’s nod to Atlantic City’s past) can put you over the top in terms of occupancy and success.

The fundamental of marketing for a Hotel is that you must have a nice and beautiful Hotel Website. Consider using Hotel WordPress Theme Sailing – the best WordPress hotel theme for your business.

The good thing for many start-ups is that the Internet has made this marketing aspect considerably easier. You can now put your boutique hotel on a level playing field with some of the larger branded properties thanks to the benefits of travel search engines like Expedia, Bing, Hotels.com and more as a great way to raise your brand recognition.

No matter how you break it down, it comes down to your return on investment as a boutique hotel. But with no franchise fees and the opportunity to operate with your own customer service ideas and brand characteristics, boutiques offer the chance to succeed as an independent hotel.