Meet Belise - Our New Minimalist WordPress Theme for Restaurants

Weve been busy since our recent launch of Hestia, an awesome material design theme. While Hestia was an all-purpose business theme, weve gone niche with Belise, our newest addition to the ThemeIsle shop. The Belise WordPress theme is focused on restaurants, bars, and other food-related business. Its our first foray into the niche, and were excited to show you everything that this theme can do.In this post, youll learn more about the themes functionality as well as get a peek at some behind the scenes stories and thoughts from our talented development team.What is Belise and who did we build it for?In a nutshell, Belise is a premium WordPress theme for restaurants, bistros, pubs, cafes, tea housesanything related to food and drink! It has a minimalist and welcoming design, with white and beige color accents. The layout and the overall appearance are elegant and allow you to put the focus on your beautiful food and drinks.With Belise, you can show people your best food via beautiful ph oto galleries or the portfolio section, keep your customers up to date about upcoming events, allow customers to book tables online, and display your offerings in a clean and simple menu.When it comes to its design, the theme provides a full-width header with a reservation button, classy photo galleries, opening and closing hours presented in a nice table, a beautiful events list, a full-width call-to-action ribbon, and a great online store  for those who want to take orders online.You can purchase Belise directly from our  theme shop for $99, which also includes all of the other 20+ premium themes weve created.Get Belise +  20 premium themes for $89Why and how we built BeliseBelise is ThemeIsles first attempt to build something oriented towards restaurant owners, while also remaining flexible enough that it can be adapted for other uses as well (more on this later!).The idea behind BeliseOriginally born from our CEOs idea of tackling a new niche for the ThemeIsle store, Belis e is the result of four months of work from our development team. Everyone worked to make Belise a success, with Bogdan Popa heading up the overall coding process.Its worth mentioning that this theme is Bogdans first project since he joined ThemeIsle back in October last year, and he did an awesome job. We are all proud of the end product from Bogdan and the rest of the team.So, wed love to wish hearty congratulations to Bogdan for his first live WordPress theme since coming on board. He shared with me that he enjoyed working on this theme so much because he learned many new concepts during Belises development.One interesting approach Bogdan brought to Belise was to use a Jetpack module called Nova Menu for the food menu, a tool thats not very popular among the WordPress theme developers. It is actually used by one single theme (ours being the second) and he didnt have any documentation available when he developed that particular section. So he took the module and made it match the overall themes design. The result? Pure awesomeness. Heres Bogdan:Jetpacks Nova Menu seemed like a viable choice because it matched Belises design very well and it looked great too. So I customized and adjusted it a bit and you saw how it went eventually.Behind the scenes of our name choiceYou may notice a similarity between Belise the theme and the country of Belize. Thats no coincidence! We recently came across Belizes diverse and attractive food culture and thought the name will match our themes purpose perfectly.Whats more is that Belizes shore line is edged by the Caribbean Sea (and since we are the WordPress piratesyou connect the dots).Heres Wikis word on Belizean cuisine:Belizean cuisine is an amalgamation of all ethnicity in the nation, and their respectively wide variety of foods. It might best be described as both similar to Mexican/Central American cuisine and Jamaican/Anglo-Caribbean cuisine.Of course, we didnt have the chance to experiment with the traditional food of Belize, nor have we ever tasted any of their recipes. But the idea of such diversity seemed close to what we were trying to achieve  in the first place, which is why we went with it for the name.ThemeForest submissionApart from being available here at ThemeIsle, Belise is also live on ThemeForest, from where you can download it by itself for just $49. So, if you prefer to only buy Belise without the entire package that contains all of our premium WordPress themes, you can download it from ThemeForest  instead.Get Belise for $49Belises featuresLets dig a bit into Belises core to see all of the great features  that come packaged with it.Responsive design. Obviously. 🙂Elegant portfolio via Jetpack. The portfolio comes in handy whenever you want to showcase your products dishes, drinks, whatnots. The portfolio works with the help of the Jetpack plugin.Food menu integrated via Jetpack. If youre building a restaurant website then showing the menu is an absolute must, no tw o words about it. The menu page in Belise is clean and minimal, which lets you put your dishes first and foremost. The menu itself works via the Jetpack plugin and its Nova Menu module.Events section via the Events Organizer plugin. If your restaurant or pub hosts events of any kind (music, contests, art galleries, etc.) then you will surely enjoy the possibility to showcase these events with Belise. This is achieved via the Events Organizer plugin.WooCommerce ready. Maybe you dont want to just serve food at the table but also take orders for home delivery or sell other products altogether. Since Belise is 100% WooCommerce friendly, thats easy to do.Custom colors. You probably want your site to match your brands colors. Dont worry! We brought you unlimited color options, so feel free to mix/combine them the way you like no restrictions at all.Live customizer supported. Any change you make can be observed in real time, without leaving the customization page. No guesswork involved wh en customizing your website.Intuitive contact form via the Pirate Forms plugin. Offer your clients a simple and quick way to contact you. For a restaurant, customer feedback is essential to improving your service. We integrated our Pirate Forms plugin with Belises design to create a gorgeous contact page.Translation ready. Belise can be translated into any language, so youre never limited to just English.Custom backgrounds. Change your sites background to a custom color or image from your computer. Its all up to you what your site looks like in the end.A  multipurpose WordPress themeEven though weve built Belise specifically for restaurants, its by no means limited to that use. Belise has a multipurpose design and provides all the features that youd expect in a multipurpose WordPress theme. Our primary goal is always to build a product to meet all of our customers needs and give them the flexibility needed to create a gorgeous site.Bogdan emphasized this aspect himself:Belise is a theme that we present as a restaurant theme, and we did build it with this aspect in mind, but it can be adapted for any other purpose due to its great flexibility and the broad look of its interface.If you customize it, it works for almost anything. Feel free to use Belise for music bands, festivals, online shops, resume and portfolio sites, or businesses like startups or creative agencies. Or anywhere else your imagination takes you!Sites that use BeliseHere are some examples of early uses of Belise by our customers:  Ã‚  Have a cool site built with Belise? Let us know.Check out the free version of BeliseIf you like Belise, but you dont have much of a budget to invest in your next theme, weve got some great news: theres also a free version of it  available: Belise Lite.And guess what? It is nearly as feature-rich as the premium theme. We want you to get the most out of Belise, no matter what your budget is.Download Belise Lite for freeWhats next for Belise?New restaurant modu les and pluginsOn a different note, we are planning to improve Belise even more by adding more plugins, modules, and elements that will make the theme even better for restaurant websites using WordPress. We havent set a deadline for this yet, but its in our plans for the near future.And that concludes our introduction of Belise, the most recent theme in the ThemeIsle family. We would be more than happy  if youd take a look and shared your thoughts with us. Also, stay tuned for even more news and releases that are on the way.