Guest written by our friend Gladys Fuentes

Opening my restaurant last year was terrifying, for a myriad of reasons. The first night we were open, three of my seven servers just failed to show up, and my lemon distributor was also M.I.A. How was I supposed to make lemon chicken with no lemons? Besides the obvious hiccups within the restaurant, I had a hard time getting our restaurant’s website live and showing in search results as well. Creating the actual website was no hassle at all. I researched domain names at sites like http://www.domainnames.com then worked on the site myself in my spare time. I had a full menu and photos to boot, but the trouble came when local search results started merging my restaurant with a similarly named Mexican restaurant down the street. Now when people searched for “Italian Portland” the Mexican restaurant showed at our address! It took months to get the issue straightened out, but now I think we’re back on track. That first night proved to me that I can make it through any curveball the restaurant biz throws at me which unfortunately, appears to be a lot!

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