YO! Website Design and Build Share: Ridgeway Score Awaiting client review n/a Date Published 29 April 2019 Reading Time 4-Minute Read Ridgeway transformed YO!’s rich offline offering into a compelling online experience customers. Optimising Online Visibility in the Restuarant Space When leading high street Japanese restaurant brand YO! needed a new website, they approached Ridgeway to transform their rich offline offering into a compelling online experience for customers. The result was a new site that showcases the brand’s range of delicious dishes and ingredients and enables customers to order take away or book themselves onto a Sushi making class. Online Restaurant Space The established YO! brand is over 20 years old and has an impressive 100 restaurants around the world. The website marks part of YO!’s strategy to increase the brand’s online visibility in the restaurant space. Over the last year, YO! has been focused on increasing footfall to their restaurants, and their new website has been implemented to support this. YO! wanted a website which expanded on their already-strong brand, to make the user journey more seamless and give customers the opportunity to engage more deeply with their brand and menu. Keeping It Fresh Ridgeway was tasked with creating a website which gave YO! customers access to all the information they need about their dishes and ingredients, restaurants, and delivery options. The site is built on the Kentico CMS platform, which makes the content easy for the team at YO! to update as new dishes are added to the menu, new restaurants open and new offers go live. A Tasty Menu The new website showcases YO!’s Executive Chef’s innovative new Japanese street food-inspired menu, through exciting design, storytelling, and engaging content. Throughout the website, there is a focus on strong imagery, which was instrumental for YO! to demonstrate the quality of the ingredients and dishes that they produce. The menu features clear calorie counts to help make life easier for its customers. Eat-In or YO! to Go To maximise their online offering, the website features integrations with Deliveroo and Just Eat as well as restaurant booking functionality which is operated through designmynight. This enables customers to secure their eating space at their local YO! restaurant, supporting the aim of encouraging footfall to their restaurants whilst also offering the option to order food to their home. Sushi Sharing With the increase of dark social, more people are sharing links through messaging apps such as WhatsApp. YO! put its customer base at the heart of website functionality by enabling customers to effortlessly share dishes and food content with their friends through one of the most innovative features of the new site, a ‘share via WhatsApp’ functionality. YO! was one of the first restaurant brands to introduce this functionality which is a tangible demonstration of the innovative thinking that YO! uses to keep pace with changing customer trends. Sushi School YO! fans can also book themselves into Sushi School, an interactive sushi-making class for adults, and children can even get involved through YO!’s Mini Ninja initiative. All the classes are displayed on the website so users can easily select and pay for an event, again in partnership with DesignMyNight. The Impact The below figures compared the six-month period before launch with the six-month period after go-live: 64% Increase in page views 43% Increase in pages/session 17% Decrease in bounce rate The figures demonstrate that YO!’s website users are a lot more engaged, visiting more pages and viewing more content. The reduction in bounce rate shows that users are immediately drawn into the site and want to find out more about YO! and what they offer. In the six-month period after launch, the new menu pages received an impressive 658,000 pageviews, proving just how compelling the menu content and pages are.