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Why are restaurant websites so awful? Because of restaurant culture.

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Re: Why are restaurant websites so awful? Because of restaurant culture.

#121

Post by noeltock »

I agree with a number of the comments, I setup a business selling websites to Restaurants (another user beat me to it in mentioning it ;) ) and have now transformed it into an SaaS ( http://www.theme-force.com ). You can sign up for it and play around with it for free ( open beta ). Feel free to provide any feedback/suggestions.

Regarding the article; people have already touched on the main points, i.e. accessibility (html vs flash vs pdf) and content (essentials vs fluff), so there's not much to add here. However, I do feel Schema (something we've worked on a lot), will become more and more important.

Cheers

Re: Why are restaurant websites so awful? Because of restaurant culture.

#122

Post by wallflower »

aw3c2 wrote: post #87
wallflower wrote: post #12

Shake Shack ( http://shakeshack.com on mobile device or http://shakeshack.com/mobile/ ) is an example of a beautifully designed, minimal, useful mobile web site. Mobile websites are more than putting a mobile template on. Contrast Shake Shack with Walmart's http://walmart.com (on a mobile device) > However, the design firm pitches to the owner, not to the customers. And thus the website is designed to please them, ra…

> Shake Shack ( http://shakeshack.com on mobile device or http://shakeshack.com/mobile/ ) is an example of a beautifully designed, minimal, useful mobile web site. To enjoy the full website you need Flash 9 or greater. Please visit this website using a web browser with Flash 9 or greater installed. DOWNLOAD IT HERE. no comment ... The mobile site is kinda cute but a mess in terms of usability: On http://shakeshack.co…

I was commenting on ShakeShack's mobile website being nice from the perspective of a consumer, not from the technological implementation (I do not have experience coding in that domain). Do you have an example of a well designed mobile web site that implements best practices? I can only think of Basecamp's mobile project management site.

Re: Why are restaurant websites so awful? Because of restaurant culture.

#123

Post by thomaslangston »

ZoFreX wrote: post #102
jdminhbg wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The restaurant website topic comes up frequently, and this is a frequent response. But there are two reasons it's clearly wrong: 1) Restaurants could jam their hours and menu onto a free theme for much less money than they spend getting a bespoke Flash monstrosity and be vastly more usable, yet do the latter anyway. 2) There are lots of cash-strapped small businesses around that don't have as uniformly unusable websi…

> for much less money than they spend getting a bespoke Flash monstrosity Actually, that Flash monstrosity with animations and music playing is the cheap option. You don't even need a coder to produce a website like that, just a designer (whereas you usually need at minimum a designer + a coder to build an HTML website). The thing about sucky websites is that they are made by sucky companies, and sucky companies are…

There are free options for hosting and website creation for HTML. $0 < Designer.

Re: Why are restaurant websites so awful? Because of restaurant culture.

#124

Post by mgkimsal »

ZoFreX wrote: post #115
mgkimsal wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I'd be willing to work on a rev share basis with a restaurant on their website if they left control to me, and I had a degree of freedom in promoting it. Build a nice reservation piece, mobile alerts, etc. I'd have incentive to make it work, restaurant doesn't have to pay a lot up front, etc. They do it with opentable, why don't more restaurants work out web deals with web agencies for ongoing revenue sha…

Lots of restaurants have cash flow issues or aren't even making a profit even in the best of times. This would be a seriously risky move for a web agency in many cases and I would strongly advise against doing it unless you can afford to not get paid at all.

it would have to be contingent on trusting both sides to be honest and open re: finances. I'm thinking a little bit more of the groupon model - you pay me for every successful booking (or, booking that turned in to a paying customer). Given how many food places seemed to JUMP on groupon, they could take it one step further and say "instead of one time influx of bargain hunters, we'll manage your website - to our definition of good - and you pay us $x/table"

Re: Why are restaurant websites so awful? Because of restaurant culture.

#126

Post by dunham »

mgkimsal wrote: post #110
user24 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is a PDF download really so bad? I much prefer a PDF menu. In fact I actively look for a menu download link when I eat out, which is often. It reassures me that I'm seeing exactly the same menu that I'll see when I sit down at the table. Too often the website has a little bit of html showing a 'typical menu', and I'm left simply not knowing if the food on the site is the food you're offering tonight. But when I see…

It'd be nice to have both, but the PDF is often too small to read on most screens, requires a lot of scrolling, etc. Similarly, just because you have a PDF menu doesn't mean they have the food on the menu. PDF menus that simply say "daily soup" or "ask for our specials" are pretty much designed for in-store use only, and basically useless on the web for decision making. When you're in a restaurant already seated, you…

I think for the places we go to, a PDF menu is more likely to be accurate. The menus tend to change every few days and PDF is more likely to be part of the menu creation process than HTML.

My favorite restaurant (contigosf.com) just uploads a jpg of the menu - kinda unfortunate, but on the plus side they update it daily.

Re: Why are restaurant websites so awful? Because of restaurant culture.

#127

Post by robflynn »

robbie7 wrote: post #96

We're going to make a CMS that focuses on the activities of local businesses. Our first focus is gonna be restaurants, cause indeed most of their website suck. So we're gonna give them the opportunity to be able to update their website via our CMS, their clients are gonna be able to order food online, order a table online (we still have to checkout opentable first tho, anyone know any other services like them?), the…

I've been toying around with something similar in my spare time, though mine focuses only specifically on restaurants. I like the idea quite a bit, just haven't found the hours to dedicate to it just yet. Maybe after my product launch...

Re: Why are restaurant websites so awful? Because of restaurant culture.

#128

Post by tomkarlo »

simonw wrote: post #81
tomkarlo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's really bad, because it's generally totally unnecessary. Menus are generally almost entirely text (unless you're at McDonald's or the Chinese take-out), so there's essentially zero gain from making them a PDF. Meanwhile, they're slower to load and if you're on a device that doesn't support PDF, you're just SOL.

Menus are way more than just text - the layout, relative sizing etc are often very carefully designed to Make More Money. Salon had an article about this last year: http://www.salon.com/food/francis_lam/2010/02/22/how_menus_m...

Taking something designed to work in print and attempting to blindly replicate it (without interpretation) in a totally different medium is a way to Make Less Money.

Re: Why are restaurant websites so awful? Because of restaurant culture.

#129

Post by tibbon »

jordanlev wrote: post #94
tibbon wrote: post #58

I was talking to a local business owner who runs a new Takoyaki place in town. I mentioned he didn't have a website. We had a good conversation about it, and he was hoping to get one up but wasn't quite sure what he needed. He's a young guy a pretty savvy overall, having acquired around 4,000 Likes on Facebook and frequently updating it. I told him (and he seemed to agree) that he needed a simple website that was the…

Might want to have a look at http://www.letseat.at/

Cool site! Is it yours?

Re: Why are restaurant websites so awful? Because of restaurant culture.

#130

Post by tomkarlo »

jamesteow wrote: post #64
tomkarlo wrote: post #39

Fashion web sites, including the sites for the large brands, are just as bad as restaurant web sites. Which is even more embarrassing for an industry that's so inherently visual. Even fairly successful fashion labels will have terrible, flash-based sites with autoplay music and (often) out-of-date content, because it's too expensive or too much trouble to update the site (which probably was built lacking any kind of…

Actually, they are making changes. createthe has been transforming some high end brands towards HTML5. Thing about fashion is that it's more about brand than usability. They get a lot of their sales from their boutiques, net-a-porter, or other 3rd parties.

I wasn't thinking of the large multinational brands so much as the smaller labels that are more similar to the food trade.
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