Why are restaurant websites so horrifically bad?

Asks Farhad Manjoo on Slate.

"While lots of people have noted the general terribleness of restaurant sites, I haven't ever seen an explanation for why this industry's online presence is so singularly bruising. The rest of the Web long ago did away with auto-playing music, Flash buttons and menus, and elaborate intro pages, but restaurant sites seem stuck in 1999. The problem is getting worse in the age of the mobile Web—Flash doesn't work on Apple's devices, and while some of these sites do load on non-Apple smartphones, they take forever to do so, and their finicky navigation makes them impossible to use."

Honestly all I need from a Restaurant website are the following...

Location, Hours, phone number and MENU (and delivery option if applicable).

It can be all in plain text and if you want to get real fancy then put up a few pictures.

Honestly all I need from a Restaurant website are the following...

Location, Hours, phone number and MENU (and delivery option if applicable).

It can be all in plain text and if you want to get real fancy then put up a few pictures.

Add an answer to " do you take reservations?", and a reservation link- either to a system or a phone number , and I'm very happy with Mike's list.

And you need to have your website it up when you open the place- not several months after as happens alot.

Deb

And while a dark background may make your website look "artistic" on a large monitor, it makes it absolutely unreadable on a phone screen.

[Robin Garr]

Getting back to the original question, "Why?", in my opinion it has to do with restaurant owners being extremely busy. They think they need a website, and they're an easy sell for a startup kitchen-table Web-development operation run by people who are generally good-hearted but inexperienced, more driven by "art" than functionality. The designer creates something really pretty. The restaurant owner is enthralled, signs off, pays the check, and the designer goes away. No real thought was given to usability, accessibility, navigation or ... critically ... updating, and the restaurateur never can understand why his way cool website isn't bringing crowds to his doors.

Exactly the same thing is true, in my opinion, about the recent tsunami of local restaurant public-relations firms, many of which I know to be run by good-hearted people, and yet when I see the news releases I just shake my head, cringe a little, and feel bad about restaurant owners in this era of tight margins paying good money for a service they or an employee could easily handle in-house with a few phone calls or Emails sent during downtime. (I also get cranky because of the time I have to spend on rewrite, pulling the facts out of the hype.)

Getting back to the original question, "Why?", in my opinion it has to do with restaurant owners being extremely busy. They think they need a website, and they're an easy sell for a startup kitchen-table Web-development operation run by people who are generally good-hearted but inexperienced, more driven by "art" than functionality. The designer creates something really pretty. The restaurant owner is enthralled, signs off, pays the check, and the designer goes away. No real thought was given to usability, accessibility, navigation or ... critically ... updating, and the restaurateur never can understand why his way cool website isn't bringing crowds to his doors.

Exactly the same thing is true, in my opinion, about the recent tsunami of local restaurant public-relations firms, many of which I know to be run by good-hearted people, and yet when I see the news releases I just shake my head, cringe a little, and feel bad about restaurant owners in this era of tight margins paying good money for a service they or an employee could easily handle in-house with a few phone calls or Emails sent during downtime. (I also get cranky because of the time I have to spend on rewrite, pulling the facts out of the hype.)

Good point. I will keep that in mind. As far as having the website not ready for prime time. I am certainly guilty of that. However, I am glad we waited. I could have been one of those victims going for the flashy web site. Reading the Slate article was really helpful! Thank you.

Facebook would seem to be an answer to bad websites; easy to update, smartphone friendly, and free.

[Robin Garr]

Facebook would seem to be an answer; easy to update, smartphone friendly, and free.

Main problems there, I think, are (1) even though it's ubiquitous, not everybody is a member; and (2) even those of us on Facebook have to find the restaurant page among all the noise.

Not to say I don't think a Facebook page is not a good idea for a restaurant. It is. But ideally I like to see a restaurant with both. Web page for the basics, Facebook to get interactive with your core clientele.

At some point, when the internet and broadband world exploded, the people that sold businesses on hiring them to make sites were free lance hacks (high school kids, graphic designers without programming backgrounds, etc.) that didn't really know what they were doing. An unfortunate consequence of this is that they sold all of these restaurants (and bands...the music industry is worse than the restaurant industry.) on blinking/flashing/animated Flash nonsense with PDF menus and other atrocities.

Fortunately, with the growing popularity of devices that can't run flash (Why buy something that can't run flash? Another conversation, altogether.), the capabilities of HTML 5, the growing capabilities of free, decent CMS (Drupal, wordpress, etc.), and even Google's preference in their rankings for sites with higher performance, we're seemingly getting away from the madness.

Unfortunately, it's going to take time, because it's hard to convince somebody to spend more money than they've already spent to purchase something that they already have.

A common misconception about Facebook is that you have to be a member to view pages, you don't. Most search engines find a Facebook page earlier than a regular website. I prefer Facebook to regular sites because they give me both the basics and the last minute stuff.

More:

I briefly mentioned broadband, and I wanted to touch on what the internet was like in the early days of broadband and today. In the early days, when everybody thought Flash was awesome, it didn't matter how big and bloated and ridiculous your site was, because most people had broadband. It also didn't matter how compatible with anything the site was, because everybody had a computer running IE 6.

Fortunately for web users (unfortunately for people who already paid for a bad site), there are now browsers more readily available that adhere to the same set of HTML and CSS standards, and there are devices that aren't high speed (phones on 3G networks or worse) and don't support Flash, so people are demanding quality work, not foo-foo nonsense that only works on one browser, just on a PC/Mac.

I wouldn't say that Facebook is a good replacement for your own website for a few reasons:

1) Many work places block Facebook.

2) Many people think you have to be "on Facebook" to access a Facebook url'ed site, thus they may not click it.

3) Facebook sells advertising. You have no way to control if a competitor's advertisement is showing up on your facebook page.

4) Personally, and I think this is true for a lot of consumers, if you have a Facebook site and either no website of your own, or a bad one, you look very unprofessional. Your website, often times, is the consumer's first impression of your business. If it were free to have the inside of your business painted, even if that meant it would look just like every other free paint job at every other business in the nation, and that paint job contained advertisements for other, similar businesses, would you do it, just because you saved a few hundred bucks?

1) Many work places block Facebook.

This is a big one. Applies to me.

I didn't read the article, but I will say too many Louisville restaurants (and, presumably, restaurants in general) "post" their menus as PDF attachments. If I'm considering a new place and can only access the menu as an attachment, I move on to the next place I'm considering.

1) Many work places block Facebook.

This is a big one. Applies to me.

Same here, but they are not paying me to look at restaurant websites all day, even though I do. I'm usually looking for a place to eat after work.

Anyone hiring for "looking at restaurant websites"?