Time for Restaurants to Get Their Websites Right

I previously wrote about an experience where a restaurant forced me to visit their website for their menu, only to discover that their website (including their menu) were in Flash.

Recently, I again had the need to lookup a restaurants menu online, via a mobile device. This time, the menu was in PDF format, making me traverse virtual hoops to see what the restaurant offered. Why do restaurants make it so hard to obtain information?

I’m thinking it’s only partially their fault. Responsibility also lies with the web designer or agency that designed the site as well. Let’s face it, I’m pretty confident in saying that restaurant owners are communicating to web designers that they want a “kool” web site. So that is what the web designer delivers. However, I believe its a huge misstep to use the wrong technologies to deliver vastly important content. Let’s take a look at a few of these abused technologies, Flash, PDFs and Images.

Flash

Don’t get me wrong. You may think I hate Flash. I don’t, but like everything else, it has its place, its purpose. You have to consider the audience for a restaurant web site. Why are they coming to your site? What information are they looking for? Where are they when they’re searching for this information? The latter, specifically, is of increasing importance, with the explosion of mobile activity and smartphone usage. The majority of desktop systems have the Flash plug-in installed. Therefore, this is a non-issue. But what about mobile devices, like the iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry, etc.? Many Android phones support Flash and some Blackberries do. But Apple’s iPhone/iPad devices do not, and will not for the foreseeable future, based on business decisions. So how is a restaurant’s audience supposed to be engaged?

PDF

PDFs are another technology that have been abused through the years. First, think about the name; Portable Document Format. What could be wrong with that? Sounds mobile enough. PDFs are naturally made to exchange between people. However, whether on the desktop or mobile device, the experience from web page to PDF environment can be confusing, sometimes frustrating. And while many mobile devices have a PDF reader installed by default, others don’t. Those mobile users must download a PDF reader of choice first before viewing the menu. And let’s not forget those mobile users that simply can’t view PDFs (yes, they are out there). All this frustration would make me, as a user, give up and look for another restaurant (restaurant owners read: huge fail).

I believe most restaurant owners use PDFs for their menus and other frequently updated content because of it’s ease. They likely update their content in MS Word, save out as a PDF, then follow the instructions they were given to FTP the PDF to their web site. How can we keep the ease of use for restaurant owners, yet make the content more user friendly. My thoughts are near the end of this post.

One More … Images

I once proposed my web design services to an Asian restaurant. They never followed up with me. A year later, I noticed that they were promoting their web address. So I visited their “new” website. It looked pleasing enough, until my curiosity took me under the hood, into the code. There was very little of it. The only code was referencing images. Each page of the web site was an image. A large, file size-heavy image. The web design agency was happy; they got paid (however I question either their ethics, knowledge or skillset). The restaurant owner was happy; it looked beautiful on the screen. People must like it. Most people likely do like it, unless they want to copy/paste a menu item and tweet it. Or those on mobile phones who have to wait several minutes for the large image to load. Or the individual with visual disabilities who cannot even obtain the menu buried within the image. And for the owner; how can this restaurant ever think about appearing high enough to get noticed in the search engines without any text?

So What’s A Restaurant to Do?

First, there is a way to design an engaging restaurant site while keeping it manageable to update. Here’s some thoughts:

• Keep the Flash, just relegate it to supportive content like photo slideshows
• Keep the PDFs. They are a great alternative to the online menu that can be saved, emailed, and shared amongst friends.
• Valuable content like menus should always and primarily be textual in nature. More accessible and better for search engine ranking.
• Restaurants should consider using a content management system (CMS) to manage their websites. Content like menus, hours, etc. should be textual, and easy to update. This doesn’t have to be a monumental or costly solution. There are plenty of open source CMSs available to web designers and developers to create websites, including WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. I personally would recommend WordPress, for its easy to manipulate, extensibility and intuitive user interface.
• Lastly, and beyond the scope of content, restaurants are a natural for social media marketing. YOu should definitely leverage services like AddThis that allows you to add Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social media buttons. It also provides the functionality to email a friend (can you say viral).

Well, I hope my rant helps restaurant owners, and web designers that service restaurant web sites, with a fresh look at a new approach with your websites.