Why are restaurant web sites so bad?

http://www.juliansanchez.com/2010/12/27/why-are-restaurant-web-sites-so-bad/

by chrismealy • 16 years ago

142 116 16 years ago

angdis3• 16 years ago

Obviously, because the sites are based on decisions made by one person who is not a web design expert. But that's okay, there are ways around that problem for the restaurant-goer: yelp.com provides a useable interface, socially vetted, and normalized so that places can be compared. I hardly bother with the restaurant's site anymore, they're all on yelp.

jshen4• 16 years ago

true, but it makes it hard for those of us working on local search sites to crawl their sites too :/

byoung22• 16 years ago

Look into the Factual API for restaurants to solve this problem.

angdis3• 16 years ago

Oh, you mean "web-crawl".

With restaurants, its much better to "physically crawl", some of the really good hole-in-the-wall places, I think, would be terrible at self-categorization.

I think its much better for restaurants to list themselves with a service like "yelp" or "open-table" or even the local city paper than to try to make anything more than a bare-bones website.

albemuth• 16 years ago

I've been thinking about developing a custom cms/site builder of sorts, pitch it to one restaurant and make both the customer and owner experience really smooth. On one side, I would have a restaurant directory with all the info, recommendations and what not, but the owner would get a site with no 3rd party branding and their own domain, charge a monthly fee and get free dinners on a bunch of places.

But then I imagine explaining my idea to other people and having them ask "so, uhhm, like geocities?"

klbarry2• 16 years ago

I did local SEO work for a while - I assure you, assuming small business owners have knowledge of even geocities is greatly overestimating their technical knowledge.

bradleyland• 16 years ago

Perhaps there is no business case for having a good, CSS/HTML based website when your business is turning over tables?

That's a serious question. Has anyone here been involved with a restaurant or food-service related start-up that isn't an aggregator or social networking play? Maybe someone can shed some light on the roadblock?

klbarry2• 16 years ago

Restaurant owners don't know who to trust, and have no judge of the skill of website builders and/or price. They are often pitched by various company's and the one that eventually gets through will by no means be the best.

chunkyslink3• 16 years ago

See my comments above http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2044753

Restaurants need to see results

1. Grow their email database and they have contacts they can market to. 2. Engage the customers with the site. Keep them coming back. 2 for 1 vouchers anyone? 3. Provide the basic information like where, when and how much. Make this accessible across devices.

It doesnt matter how good your site is, if your food sucks you loose.

trafficlight2• 16 years ago

All I want to see are the menu and the hours of operation.

Volscio2• 16 years ago

Word. I want the hours, location, phone number, and menu. All in a format I can copy & paste into my email to convince my friends to go.

I rarely get any of that at a restaurant's web site.

No wonder that it's easier to google/yelp it and use their listings.

trafficlight2• 16 years ago

That information, if it's there at all, is usually buried in some awful Flash animation.

davidmurphy• 16 years ago

And I want the PRICES to be in that menu. Drives me nuts when there are generic menus with no clue of prices.

cubicle67• 16 years ago

See, that's where it gets hard. Menus, and especially prices, change. People get upset if they're charged differently to what they saw on the website, and keeping the two in sync requires a conscious effort on behalf of the restaurant that it's not likely going to receive.

There's two way around this problem (keeping the website up to date) that I can see: integrate with existing POS system (expensive and hard) or offer a service to update the site for them.

There's an idea for someone - buy yourself a fax machine (yes, really), and offer a service whereby clients fax you a copy of their menu when it changes and you update their website.

lowglow12• 16 years ago

I'm working on a site for people like us : http://www.onebigmenu.com It's still in development, but the basics work. :)

chunkyslink3• 16 years ago

And a voucher that is valid for the day you are visiting.

bdclimber143• 16 years ago

Because restaurant owners are barely figuring out what email is.

How often do you go to restaurant websites vs. actual restaurants (not including Yelp or Google maps)? Truth is, they just don't matter. The cost of creating a website, even a $500 design over a CMS doesn't justify the cost. Also, a small business restaurant owner won't know how to operate a CMS. They just figured out email, remember? Worse, is that websites turn from beautiful assets to liabilities.

The nephew of some restaurant owner finally convinces him or her that the restaurant needs a website. The kid builds it for $100, everything is great. Until the business owner needs to change store hours.

"What's that password that kid gave me again? What do I do with that password? He mentioned logging in somewhere... Now that kid has a job at Google or is doing a startup and doesn't have the time to mess with $10/hr type of work anymore. Crap, now all my patrons are expecting me to be closing later and I am turning them down. What a huge pain, I have to go find a new web designer."

The solution needs to be the anti-CMS. Something that's not as simple as email, but as FAMILIAR ... Email is simple, but it was a huge learning curve for that small business owner. And learning something else just as simple will be a huge pain.

jdminhbg• 16 years ago

"The cost of creating a website, even a $500 design over a CMS doesn't justify the cost."

The question I guess is why restaurant owners spend money having flash monstrosities built when most users -- especially those on mobile devices, which is a big use-case for restaurant websites -- would rather see plain-jane HTML with an address, phone number, and menu.

"The nephew of some restaurant owner finally convinces him or her that the restaurant needs a website."

I suspect this is closer to the truth. The restaurant owner demographic probably runs in the same circles as the dilettante designer demographic, so the site is built by a wait(er|ress) with a copy of Flash CS.

bdclimber143• 16 years ago

I agree, that's why it's Flash too. Beginning designers statistically think the flashier (no pun intended) the design, the better.

zacstewart2• 16 years ago

So true. I designed a site for a restaurant while working there as a delivery driver. The site, sucks, and I'm aware of that, but for the hassle of physically meeting with the owner to get the specific on an update about a Christmas party update or the unwillingness to pay something worth 10 hours of work per month I'm not really going to try to improve it.

I have a job at a web agency now and doing anything better than what's there simply wouldn't make since.

alanh• 16 years ago

Totally. Earlier in my web development career I re-sold hosting to a friend who, as a waitress, did the website for the place she worked. It was pretty terrible, stale, hard to update, and had (I think) BMP format scanned menus. Eventually she was fired and I was dragged into a horrible mess over who actually owned the site, when my friend asked me to take it down (she was the only one I ever dealt with).

spitfire2• 16 years ago

Someone needs to make tumblr for front page/business card websites.

erreon• 16 years ago

Something like about.me for businesses would be great. Maybe a second editable page with REALLY easy to lists. That way businesses can easily list services or menu items.

jordanlev• 16 years ago

A few people have. This one looks particularly good: http://letseat.at

jarin2• 16 years ago

Squarespace is a pretty good bet for a modestly computer literate restaurant owner.

trop2• 16 years ago

> Because restaurant owners are barely figuring out what email is.

That seems a bit condescending to restaurant owners? Rather, perhaps, they are so much in the real world, dealing with suppliers, cooks, kitchen equipment, waiters, decor, etc., that navigating the virtual (websites) is antithetical?

japherwocky2• 16 years ago

My experience has been kind of like this. The owners are pretty smart people but don't have the time/energy to figure out website tech.

bdclimber143• 16 years ago

I don't think it's condescending, I think its accurate.

I didn't say they are too dumb to figure it out... I just said they are barely figuring it out, probably because of all the things you listed.

dasht• 16 years ago

Because a lot of web site design services sold to restaurants are sold by hucksters.

p.s.: not all hucksters know that that's what they are. Heck, you or I might be one, without meaning to be so. Of course, plenty enough do mean to be so and do awright for themselves that way.

sudont2• 16 years ago

Touché. Now, just to figure out how to sell our honest and genuine services to them.

Cold calling? Anybody with similar experience? I’m genuinely interested.

netcan• 16 years ago

I think you underestimate the powers that have given rise to the current state of affairs. Ecosystems of sellers usually develop around the characteristics of buyers. Restauranteurs are (as a general rule) terrible buyers and terrible clients.

You might look at a site and think "that'll take x hours to do," but you need to factor in the time that it takes to get the client there. In my experience, that's several times x. Just making the sale could be several times x.

You need to realize you are starting from scratch and that from where you stand, it's hard to know where scratch is. You will need to convince them why flash is bad (even though everyone they ask thinks it looks great). This is just one example. They will not be able to evaluate the site from the perspective of the user, that kind of thinking takes practice.

Then crisis strikes when your offer which includes some little mini-app to do that thing they want with the menus (already done) and a custom design (hired a mid range designer) costs more than the other offer which is largely auto-generated.

The reasons are similar for large companies having bad software, they are bad buyers.

spitfire2• 16 years ago

Also, for a restaurant a website is really an extension of their menu/business card.

Frankly, the websites that a lot of restaurants have are perfectly fine. Even the ones made by hucksters. Is the address and phone number clearly marked? A map? Menu? Wine list? If you wanted to get fancy you could update it regularly with events and specials, but that's not really necessary.

sdizdar• 16 years ago

I spent some time doing customer development for my http://wall.si project, so I have some experience with this.

The top four concerns for restaurants are: personnel, personnel, personnel, and personnel.

Cool looking web site is really peripheral for many restaurants. Mobile support .. What?

dasil003• 16 years ago

One reason for menus in PDF is because the menus may change frequently, and a PDF is easy to create from their actual print menus. It doesn't seem like a big deal to update both an InDesign layout and a website, but if different people do those two things, then it's quite likely a mistake will be made, so it's smart just to use the already proofed version.

ronnier3• 16 years ago

I also deal with this while keeping my resume updated and tweaked. I have an HTML, PDF, and MS Word format. I use a print CSS sytle sheet on my homepage (http://ronnie.me) so that I can print it to PDF for the PDF version and manually create the Word version. Very tedious.

jat850• 16 years ago

That's really neat. Is the CSS file readily available (for others to use), or something you'd prefer not to give out?

(I realize I could probably crawl through the source on your page and just take it, but that seems rude without asking.)

antrix• 16 years ago

I do something similar for my resume (http://antrix.net/resume/). Started with a template by timbray [1] which I 'imported' into Google Docs by directly editing the document CSS & HTML. Finally, export from Google Docs as doc, pdf, etc.

The HTML version on my site has additional print specific CSS to switch fonts, background colour, etc. making the print output more pleasing.

[1] http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/11/12/Template.h...

BrandonM2• 16 years ago

Ugh. Just learn LaTeX and write once.

joezydeco• 16 years ago

I would be happy if most of the restaurant sites I visit used PDF for menus. They either have nothing, or a badly formatted Word doc that needs custom fonts (no, my install of OSX 10.6 does not have Papyrus, let's keep it that way).

callmeed• 16 years ago

I'm working on something at the moment. Just hours + menu + some optional social integration.

Based the research/feedback I've done, decision makers have near-zero time to learn or use a cms (hence why menus are always in PDF) and near-zero budget.

So what I'm going for is a super-simple system much like about.me/flavors.me ... something around $5 to $9/month or possibly even free and use it as a gateway to other services (also working on a diy groupon clone and staff scheduler for restaurants).

lowglow12• 16 years ago

Hey, I'm working on something like this too :)

davej• 16 years ago

I know first-hand what kind of budgets most small/medium-sized restaurants have for websites and online marketing.

Its much better to put resources and money into a profile/photos/menu on a site like http://www.grabmytable.com/ than doing a half-arsed 'proper' website.

patio11• 16 years ago

Restaurants aren't unique offenders. Most physically extant businesses which can't transact online suck. Try your dentist's.

dholowiski• 16 years ago

Try brewery/beer sites!

te_chris• 16 years ago

The irony about these (at least in NZ) is that they're normally some of the most expensive, flash-bound websites out there.

verisimilitude• 16 years ago

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.

SquidLord• 16 years ago

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.

redwood• 16 years ago

No matter how unique a restaurant's website is, it cannot satisfy a customer to that restaurant: only the food can. Thus there is little impetus for the restaurant to try to create a good experience online.

throw_away• 16 years ago

I was going to write pretty much the same comment on the tazo tea landing page discussion, but online sales aren't the end-all-be-all justification for having a good, easy to use web site. Very often, if I'm considering going to a restaurant or coffeeshop that I've never been to, I'll look for a website to figure out the hours, location and menu & perhaps to find out more about the place. A website that is difficult to navigate or looks ugly won't hurt them, exactly, as I wasn't a customer, but a good site might compel me to visit or to try their product next time I have a chance. I've also chosen not to try out places and products before, just because I couldn't figure out an easy way of knowing whether they were open or because I couldn't figure out more info about the product.

Furthermore, there are places that I go to regularly whose easy access to info regarding hours and menu causes me to go there more often. Here is one from a place I like: http://eathomegrown.com/ Could be better (uses flash), but the info I want is there. And they have a blog and social media presence. All this has resulted in more than a few conversions into sandwich purchases from me, personally.

HeyLaughingBoy• 16 years ago

Oh, it will easily lose them business. Generally when I eat out, I'll have a few restaurants in mind and will browse their menus before making a decision. Even if I've been there many times, I'll compare menus so I can decide what I'm in the mood for. If it takes too long to figure out the menu (some places have an absolutely maddening UI) I just won't bother with that restaurant and move on to the next one.

You can't make money if you can't even get customers in the door!

dedward2• 16 years ago

Food and service. Service is equally important.

mediocre food and superb service gets customers better than superb food with shitty service.

I can see see a way that ... nevermind, i'll just go do it rather than let someone beat me to it.

jasonlbaptiste• 16 years ago

I think there are a few things here that cause this:

a) You're going against the worst kind of incumbent- the 15 year old nephew or kid next door. He's cheaper, good enough, and "trusted". He is competition that exists a million times over.

b) Even if your system is better, they just can't be bothered to even get a good demo. You definitely need to build something so usable and good it's frightening, but good luck getting the full demo.

c) The guys that do have the ability to get in with a demo (GoDaddy, yellow pages,etc.) have no clue how to sell something good. What they usually sell is usually crappy, so now you have a fearful restaurant owner.

d) To crack this market it's a "heavy startup". It requires lots of capital, it requires sales, and it requires marketing. That's something guys like us don't like to often venture into. It's the same reason GroupOn requires lots of capital and other business like ReachLocal have feet on the street.

e) Churn is miserable. If you're on a monthly fee or provide additional services, good luck keeping the customer. ReachLocal has something like 80% churn,not retention, fucking churn.

Here's how I'd go about this for months 1-9. Crack the nut of an easy to use system (point b) and find distribution channels that already exist (point c) such as local newspapers, print shops, and others with a foot into the local market. You'd also need to have a system of people to crank out onboarding in a very cost efficient and systematic manner.

Retric• 16 years ago

The other problem is going beyond, "hours of operation/location" + "menu" + "phone number" takes integration with on site software. So now your competing with all those Point Of Sale systems.

IMO, there is a huge opportunity for a unified website + POS + Back end software company. But, to step beyond what's out there would take a huge investment.

genieyclo• 16 years ago

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

I help run a family restaurant with tight margins to deal with. With really small capital to budget, my father and uncle decided a POS system was not worth the money and commissioned me to build a usable system since I was the "tech guy" of the family.

I hacked something up using kiosk mode browser running off of locally-hosted PHP scripts saving to a MySQL database that backsup online nightly to Google Docs. It's an old computer and hacky system, but it works because of the ability to review data at night at home in the office via GDocs with pretty stats and keeps the family happy.

I asked previously here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1431181 on HN, but got no response.

I'd devote more time to this and get a better MVP out the door except for extreme time commitments to said restaurant on the floor and in the back, and due to school commitments.

Like Retric said, you could make a killing with a web presence+POS on the floor+cloud saving features if you built a startup that showed how you could save time and money for restaurants and make things easier, while not charging for an arm and a leg. The market is filled with Geocities-era looking sites from spammish vendors all with their unique-as-a-snowflake proprietary file and data formats.

tucker1213• 16 years ago

So true. The restaurant market is a tough nut to crack but if you manage to do it you will be very glad you stuck it out. I only disagree with e. Our churn (tripleseat.com) is less then 1%. If you provide value and have a good relationship restaurant people are very loyal and will stick with you in good times and bad. If your churn is bad try annual pricing at a discount. Restaurateurs love to negotiate and annual pricing at a discount is a win/win

Volscio2• 16 years ago

I wonder how well food truck businesses stack up in this category. I'd expect them to be more nimble, more accessible, with better web sites.

smackfu• 16 years ago

Even there, it tends to just be a twitter feed.

daveambrose• 16 years ago

From experience, this is a very high touch business with intense sales efforts to scale. One company that's in our backyard here in NYC has had success with a sales and channel model is SinglePlatform.

They are a bit under the radar but are solving these problems in realtime within a huge market.

T_S_• 16 years ago

Most web sites are bad. That's why.

Eventually things like Google Places, Yelp, etc. will handle 100% of their UX.

jarin2• 16 years ago

Having worked with restaurants before (and having a dad who owns a restaurant), I have come to the conclusion that it's just because most restaurant owners a) just want something that works and is cheap, and b) do not fully understand how web design can help or hurt their businesses.

Bad web designers tend to target restaurants (and medical practitioners) because they have a much easier time selling bad design to them.

lowglow12• 16 years ago

http://www.onebigmenu.com

I'm working on this site right now, and I understand your concerns because I feel them myself. I'm hoping I can bridge the gap between dining and diner. :)

(Please excuse the design, since I'm the only developer :P)

aberkowitz• 16 years ago

I'd advise that you nuke the frontpage. Instead, make it location aware and show categories (ex: recommended, asian, mexican, american, italian, greek, other) with five restaurants each.

The individual restaurant pages are very clean and informative compared to what you might see on a restaurant website. The only things missing are restaurant hours and pictures of food items.

lowglow12• 16 years ago

I understand exactly what you're talking about and we now have people inputting hours. I'm going to clean up the front page with things that make sense to people, but right now it's under HEAVY development, and I'm the only developer :P

redgirlsays• 16 years ago

That's really cool, I like where you're going with One Big Menu. When I visit a restaurant, I want to know how good what I'm ordering is--I don't care if the restaurant is 5 stars, if what I ordered is the crappiest thing on the menu.

lowglow12• 16 years ago

I know, and I want to provide a good interface for people to find exactly what they want, when they want. :) And the pictures will provide people with a view into what they're ordering. I think this is the major reason people aren't exploring with dining. :)

lowglow12• 16 years ago

Oh, also, I'm looking for a designer to help out. So if you're interested let me know :)

lowglow12• 16 years ago

One last thing, If any developers want to join forces, that would be cool too :)

earino• 16 years ago

This interests me. What's the plaform?

tk999• 16 years ago

What is your email? I am interested.

blhack2• 16 years ago

Huh. I just realized that I have a strange association between restaurants and their websites.

My expectation of quality is inversely correlated to the quality of their website. When I see a restaurant website that is "good", it makes me thing "chain. corporate. bland. boring."

ronnier3• 16 years ago

Am I the only person who doesn't mind chain and corporate eateries?

mgkimsal• 16 years ago

No you're not. I enjoy restaurants, regardless of whether they're chain or indie. If it's good it's good, if not, not. Bonus of chains is that if it's good one place, it's probably good in most places.

blhack2• 16 years ago

No, and neither do I. One of my favorite chain places that I eat at all the time is Jimmy Johns. They have awesome sandwiches. I always joke with my friends that, if they like subway, they should definitely not go to JJ because they're never going to be able to eat it ever again.

What I was getting at is that a crappy website can sometimes be a good indicator for places like the little deli that I go to sometimes, or my neighborhood bar. If the little deli (called cheese and stuff, for you Phoenicians: http://www.cheesenstuffdeli.com/) had a "good" website, it would seem out of character to me.

rwhitman• 16 years ago

Luddite client meets designer who has made their living wowing luddite clients with style over substance.

Also note that movie websites have the same problem. For mostly the same reasons, though the organizations involved and cash transactions are much larger...

julian37• 16 years ago

Here be more lamenting over awful restaurant web sites:

http://www.portlandfoodanddrink.com/2010/03/what-is-it-about...

http://www.badlanguage.net/why-are-restaurant-websites-so-aw...

http://blogs.houstonpress.com/eating/2010/09/10_reasons_your...

3pt14159• 16 years ago

The reason these websites are bad is because the owners have never heard of conversions, marketing iteration, "the funnel", so what they end up with is a shitty site that they forget about.

zacstewart2• 16 years ago

After delivering pizza for a restaurant for two years, I finally convinced the owner that his free, Frontpage-generated site wasn't good enough, and got him to pay me to do a redesign. I learned a few things along the way.

1. Restaurants have tiny margins. 7% profit is doing well, and dishing out $1k or more for what they perceive to be a Yellow Pages ad is unthinkable for a brick and mortar store.

2. Restaurant people are techno-iliterates (in general). I set up a Google Apps account so the managers could communicate with branded email, share documents, schedules, etc, and had to give more than a couple training sessions on these basic tools.

3. They don't consider it something to be 'involved' with. I've tried to press the point of building a presence through social networks, etc, but they can't wrap their heads around it. To them, you should pay someone (as little as possible) for it and it does it's job.

4. They explicitly ask for the faux pas. Owner asked me to take down the "outdated announcement" that we'll be having an event, since it was from last month. This is on the blog portion of the site. Owner asked me to upload the rest of the photos from an event (at least a hundred), even though the entire album is on Facebook, even though I explained no one in the world is going to care enough to flip through hundreds of jell-o wrestling photos on the news page of some restaurant's website. Owner asked for a photo background versus the subtle textured one I had designed the site with.

In the end, trying to teach them what emails is, arguing over design elements and explaining how people will use the site isn't worth it because they are going to be more work and less money than just about any other business owner. Slap something together and collect your $500.

chunkyslink3• 16 years ago

We've been quite successful at cracking the UK market and we run the sites for a few of the UK's biggest chains down to some smaller brasserie style companies.

I'd like to present some work which I think is good for a change (there are a lot of bad examples on here)

So here we go

http://giraffe.net

http://www.chezgerard.co.uk

http://www.brasseriegerard.co.uk

Some of our older ones

http://www.strada.co.uk

http://www.caferouge.co.uk

http://www.bellaitalia.co.uk

The most visited pages on our busiest sites are

1. Offers and vouchers

2. Locations

3. Menus

so it is really important to do those well.

Also we've recently launched a product that allows anyone with a website the ability to have a content managed mobile site set up and working in no time.

The product is called http://www.pocketdiner.co.uk

Any feedback or comments are welcome

iheartmemcache• 16 years ago

Well, I think we're all thinking it- how'd you go about acquiring your customers (as that's a notoriously hard market to crack)?

Also, your pricing for "Chain" @PocketDiner seems wayyy too low. Even £49/mo for "Multi" is probably priced too low. The overhead per store per hour is probably more than that.

lowglow12• 16 years ago

thanks. This gives me something to focus on.

Erwin• 16 years ago

At the gourmet high end, my favourite is http://www.squarerestaurant.com/ -- I love the big, big pictures of food, and of course all the other information being available. They use the same format at Pied a Terre.

The annoying ones are e.g. http://www.wildhoneyrestaurant.co.uk/ -- useless use of Flash, this could be done in pure HTML and not force me to scroll a tiny frame with a menu. It could be much worse though, el bulli's website has a "virtual city" you have to wander through in order to select a wine from their menu -- "easy and fun" they say: http://vins.elbulli.com/elbullivi.php?lang=en

known• 16 years ago

No need for sites. Use twitter.

angdis3• 16 years ago

Indeed. I went to a fabulous tiny restaurant in philly recently. While chatting with owner, she mentioned that a reservation had just canceled and then proceeded to tweet that there was an open table. Within literally 2 minutes, she filled the reservation.

Who says restaurant owners don't get computers!

The saavy ones know their core competency and don't try to get fancy. The restaurant I mentioned has a super simple website done with inuit sitebuilder. It does the job, but with places like this the most important thing is what others say about the place and the clout the owner cultivates with their customers.

prawn2• 16 years ago

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?

japherwocky2• 16 years ago

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. :)

prawn2• 16 years ago

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.

edanm• 16 years ago

Interestingly, here in Israel, there's a standard layout for restaurant websites that is almost always used, and it's pretty good.

I'm not 100% clear on the history, but afaik, a website called Rest.co.il (a restaurant directory), offers restaurants a service for creating a website for them. I'm guessing that initially, most restaurants that didn't have a website just created one through Rest. Nowadays, 80% of restaurant websites I visit are Rest-operated sites, with a very decent standard layout, including quick-info for getting their number, quick info on average prices of meals, maps, and detailed menus.

More and more restaurants are creating "unique" websites nowadays, but I think because the level was so high initially, they're doing a pretty good job of it. Pretty funny considering for other things in Israel, there is much less web-awareness than in the States.

If you want examples (sorry, they're in Hebrew, but you can see they look the same). Bottom-left is the quick-info, including information on accessibility for people with disabilities, whether the food is Kosher, hours that they're open, etc.:

http://www.rest.co.il/sites/Default.asp?txtRestID=1796

http://www.rest.co.il/sites/Default.asp?txtRestID=7775

Semiapies• 16 years ago

"sorry, they're in Hebrew"

Eh, that's what Google Translate is for.

That looks like a perfectly good standard template, both visually and in hitting the points of what customers want to know - menus (with prices!), hours, links to directions, some sense of what the place looks like, etc.

"because the level was so high initially, they're doing a pretty good job of it"

Very cool. There's something to be said for a genuinely good basic approach.

augustiner• 16 years ago

I once built an online dish ordering website with interface similar to digg and reddit. It showed dishes in your area sorted by the number of times they have been ordered online. I still host a short video demo of the site: http://video.eatlista.pl/ (it's in Polish language, but still, could be inspiring for someone).

Anyway I ditched the idea after talking to restaurant owners, they were mostly older people, having hard time grasping the concept of the site (and even the Internet itself) and I didn't enjoy the idea of educating them.

ianlotinsky• 16 years ago

SandwichBoard does restaurant web sites (http://www.sandwichboard.com/).

We've found that the owners and managers who "don't get it" are the ones who think that the web site experience should be the same as the restaurant experience: background music, a menu that looks identical to the physical one, and a picture of every dish.

The ones who do "get it" entrust their web site to designers and usability experts who make it their goal to turn web site visitors into patrons.

dedward2• 16 years ago

Many - because they don't need a better online presence to get more business. Their tables are full - the only way to squeeze more profits is to charge more, possibly changing clientele, or act more efficiently, or both.

A cool website for reservations/tables/photos etc COULD be part of a themed restaurant or restaurant chain to differentiate them in the market... but for the most part, the food speaks for itself.

Why are restaurant web sites so bad?

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