Why are restaurant web sites so bad? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why are restaurant web sites so bad?

#121

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 29, 2010, 1:53 PM UTC

SquidLord wrote: post #77

verisimilitude wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh my god, dentist's websites. I've one full year of dental school left, and as I'm looking around for a job, I sometimes wonder if I should just be a dental website designer instead of a dentist.

So ... why NOT be a dentist website designer, at least part-time? You know the business needs, you know the lingo of both (you're here, anyway) ... It sounds like a job that fills a needed niche! Better sites == more hits due to easier searching; there's a business case. I say go for it.

[deleted]

Re: Why are restaurant web sites so bad?

#122

Post by Charuru » Wed, Dec 29, 2010, 1:54 PM UTC

dodyg wrote: post #89

SquidLord wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So ... why NOT be a dentist website designer, at least part-time? You know the business needs, you know the lingo of both (you're here, anyway) ... It sounds like a job that fills a needed niche! Better sites == more hits due to easier searching; there's a business case. I say go for it.

It is a tough market to operate on since a lot of dentists are busy people and usually their practice is managed by marketing consultants that do their local marketing/business promotion for them. It's not a straight forward "Let's meet and I build you a kick ass website" business. We have been trying to crack in to this niche for almost two years with our http://patientboost.com/default.html service but it is a damn…

What the? Am I the only one seeing floating black flash boxes in the middle of the website?

Re: Why are restaurant web sites so bad?

#123

Post by lowglow » Wed, Dec 29, 2010, 7:02 PM UTC

jdavid wrote: post #100

lowglow wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple lamp stack using codeigniter. Nothing fancy. Runs on MediaTemple's VE Server.

why didn't you choose kohana? http://kohanaframework.org/ it's based off of codeigniter, but it's fully OO. are you using some sort of ORM like active record? if you are, you should look at the tables and see how many joins the ORM layer is doing so you know how much work it's going to be to scale.

Hey Justin, thanks for the tip. I'll check it out. I'm not using Active Record currently, but scaling up is something I worry about and just won't understand until I have the problem first hand. Maybe we can chat about this sometime.

Re: Why are restaurant web sites so bad?

#124

Post by prawn » Thu, Dec 30, 2010, 11:53 PM UTC

japherwocky wrote: post #84

prawn wrote: post #78

Anyone tried offering a deal to a restaurant owner whereby you get a tab (e.g., shout friends a $500 dinner) to build a site and then a lunch/dinner per month in exchange for maintenance of menus, etc?

I built/host a site for a local brewery, and I bill them $X/mo for hosting and small tweaks. We've definitely bartered some of those invoices away. :)

I just wondered about sending a letter to a swag of restaurants offering it as a service. Say that the first 3-5 to respond can take up the offer but potentially take on more. Quick site build, get interns to do the maintenance, and then eat out at a different restaurant each night of the month. Hmmm.