With the help of a brand new restaurant theme and tools

Nov 29, 2012 19:11 GMT  ·  By

WordPress.com is still the world's largest blogging platform, though that depends on how you define a blog, but the company behind it has been looking at ways of expanding beyond the classic blog.

These days, WordPress, the software, is positioned more as a CMS than as a simple blogging tool.

As such, WordPress.com is expanding its reach as well, the latest target being restaurant sites.

An easy target at that, it may be a coincidence or there may be a link, but restaurant sites all over the world are overwhelmingly bad.

They assault you with slideshows, videos, music blaring in the background, flashy animations and so on, but they keep the most important info, like the menu, a map and contact data, well hidden.

WordPress.com believes it has an answer with a new template aimed at restaurants.

But it goes beyond WordPress themes, there are a few tools restaurant owners may find useful as well, like a plugin to manage the menu from the WordPress dashboard and OpenTable support.

It's still a WordPress blog in essence, but plugins for location data, i.e. a map and hours open, or a tool to make reservations straight from the site, should come in very handy.

The theme was designed with mobile in mind, useful since that's when you really need a website to just work.

"When designing Confit, a brand-new WordPress.com theme, we started with the mobile experience and expanded thoughtfully outward to larger content views like tablets and conventional web browsers which allowed us to focus on a seamless experience for all of your site’s visitors, no matter what device they’re on," WordPress.com explained.

All of this is free of course, all you need to do is sign up, create a new blog and choose the Confit theme. If you want to customize the theme or use a custom domain, you're going to have to pay.