The hell that is a restaurant website
venomousporridge.com
Better link: http://venomousporridge.com/post/389785000/a-conversation-i-have-every-month-or-so
venomousporridge.com
We've spent a lot of time on the "Open Hours" feature - we want people to view a page and see "Open NOW", "Open Later Today", "Closed Today", etc. so that they're sure it's really open, or it will be when they take a cab across town, or so its really clear they're closed mondays and you don't go all the way there only to find that out.
However, we also want to be able to search the data ourselves, and we want it to be localized into two or three languages. So we can't just store the open hours as a string, we need to render the open hours as text but it needs to be stored as data. Generating the English/Spanish/Portuguese from the data is a lot of fun.
Restaurant sites seem to suffer in much the same way as many other industries with typically bad websites (say, real estate, legal firms, and local services). I think this might be due to the difficulty of marketing to small businesses and a general lack of (or perhaps ignorance of) technical savvy.
Thanks for the effort to make local restaurants more "usable" -- this type of endeavor can only help if it manages to catch on.
Or maybe it is because a brick-and-mortar entrepreneur has a completely different mindset from the 'Net Set (so to speak) and it's difficult to see the chasm that separates the two, much less cross it.
There's definitely a market out there that cares about small businesses on the wab, regardless of a business's current mindset, goals, or customer acquisition strategy. Either this market is small or unimportant in some fields, or it's difficult to convince business owners otherwise.
1) Local vs. global audience. I have noticed that websites for local resources tend to miss the fact that their audience on the web is global. If they have a brick and mortar presence and they aren't in a tourist-oriented industry, they seem to just not think about how to talk to a global audience. They often do a poor job of clearly indicating on their website exactly where they are (as in city/state, never mind street address). This probably also influences the lack of "hours" listed on the website. A lot of places have a certain local culture and "everyone just knows" that all restaurants are closed by 11pm (or whatever), with the obvious exception of a few places like Denny's which "everyone just knows" are open 24/7.
2) Staging. On the web, colors, layout, and architecture of information are the equivalent of "staging" of a brick and mortar business. But people who do staging are unlikely to immediately grasp this about web design. I bet there is little or no real communication happening in most cases about how to match the web design to the physical staging so customers get some kind of intuitive feel for the place from the website.
Basically, I think the mindset/mental geography of someone with a brick and mortar business is going to make most small business owners not just technically unsavvy but actually put up road blocks to the kind of thought process and presentation necessary to make a website that would serve their business well.
I hope that's a little clearer.
I bet an algorithm could be built (assuming enough data is flowing) where it automatically adjusts the hours based on when people are checking in. To go along with that, it would show the busiest times, or the "rush hours" based on the density of check-ins at any given time. That's pretty far out there, but with enough traffic flow, you could make predictions and you wouldn't rely on anyone else for that data. You could go further to say "There's a good chance this business is closed because nobody checked in today, and usually there are check-ins."
If you plugged in a calendar, your phone could recommend where to go and when to go to avoid lines. It's like you don't even need to think anymore at that point, just obey the orders your phone gives you.
however, since we're converging on a model that's slightly further toward the 'curated' side of the spectrum than a loopt/gowalla/nextstop, i think we're OK with doing some manual editing of things like open hours, and leaving the rest to the community - all of our community editing pieces aren't out yet (we all still have full-time jobs and/or ambitious clients)...
I love the check-in statistical analysis concept for data generation or at least quality control. very cool for higher volume locations.
One, every restaurant wants their site to look like every other restaurant site. Which makes a certain kind of sense, even if it's the wrong approach.
Two, web developers push this kind of website because it would be hard to justify charging a decent wage for the basic sites that restaurants really need. So they make it all fancy.
It's comparatively more difficult to pitch usability.
I agree. The design of the menus at these sorts of places gives it away. I'd rather have some jumbled, but useful, menu like they have at Jerry's or the typical diner than the over-designed moody nonsense they have at these modern "fancy" places.
"Customer has expressed an interest in having his (pet, small child)in the spot."
Bad taste is universal.
> Owners never visit their own websites after the initial presentation by the web designers because they don't need to.
However, the design firm pitches to the owner, not to the customers. And thus the website is designed to please them, rather than actually being useful for potential customers.
This phenomenon is made worse by the fact that patronage due to the website is difficult for most restaurants to quantify. The vast majority of restaurants are completely clueless as to how much business their websites are responsible for, which, as with most things unmeasured, leads to neglect and disrespect.
If more restaurants integrated aspects such as table reservations or mailing lists more restaurant owners may come to a greater respect for the importance of getting their web presence right.
This applies at least to Restaurant Manager ("RMPOS") and Digital Dining, both of which make life much, much harder for restaurant owners. Same deal for grocery stores, too. Have you ever wondered why you couldn't just load your local grocery store's website up and see what their current price for bread is, or if they're almost out of eggs? All business reasons aside, it's largely because their databases are (probably) running some hinky form of Pervasive SQL or Btrieve, which stores their information in a hard-to-decipher, proprietary format, which among other wonders "deletes" records by replacing them with nulls in the monstrously large flat file that represents their product database. (The registers communicate with the server over Samba with the help of a shared file...)
For this, restaurants and grocery stores pay tons of cash. Wanna make a bunch of money? Go fix this. Restaurant owners might even name their children after you.
> ...it seems what restaurants want to do is increase profits.
Yes, but -- based on my experience and dealing with restaurant owners in my area, anyway -- they're not interested in things like metrics or VIP programs. VIP programs don't convert as well as you might expect -- pretty poorly, in fact, given the effort that it takes to manage them -- and restaurants are typically run by chefs or foodies, not by numbers geeks.
Restaurants are really hurting right now, so anything that doesn't immediately get butts in their seats is going to be a hard sell.
Daily P&Ls are already built into the reporting functions of the POSs I've seen so far, and they have some functions for reporting on popular dishes, although that's usually more clunky. But, the line cooks are usually the ones that tell the boss what was popular that night anyway.
> Is OpenTable too big to fail (e.g. restaurants will continue to pay them annual maintenance because it is a legacy system)?
Yes and no. Once a restaurant has committed to a particular POS, it is very, very, very hard to get them away from it. First, it cost them -- at a safe ballpark estimate -- $10,000 to install it in the first place, so they're going to milk it for as long as they can before paying for anything else, even if it costs them more money that way in the long run.
Second, change is really scary for these folks, because if they're trying a new POS, and it crashes on its first evening, they're going to have a lot of pissed off customers and that translates directly to empty seats. It doesn't help that every single system that they've tried -- or that their buddies in the industry have tried -- have been buggy, problematic, and prone to crankiness.
It doesn't matter if you know that you're selling the best system in the world at the cheapest price; the owners are still going to be really gun-shy about converting.
> Can OpenTable's database be cleanroom reverse engineered so that it can be migrated to a new competitor platform?
In theory, anything's possible, but I would feel pretty safe guessing that OpenTable isn't going to make that easy. They're probably using something pretty funky. On the plus side, they're probably not encrypting it, they're just relying on security-through-obscurity. So, you should be able to figure out the basics, like item description, pretty easily. Figuring out sales or quantities might be a lot harder, not to mention figuring out links between items (like, add-ons for a particular dish).
To be honest, you might be better off committing staff to manually re-entering the restaurant's menu in your POS, rather than trying to convert OpenTable's (or anyone else's), and then just roll that into your price. This is not as horrible as it sounds; most restaurants have only a couple of pages of items, with a variety of add-ons. I've done this by myself in under a day, so it's not too bad.
> Daily P&Ls are already built into the reporting functions of the POSs I've seen so far
I finally found the NYTimes article that made me wonder if there is better software to track costs.
"“A few years ago, at Cafe Boulud, we couldn’t figure out why margins were so bad month after month,” says Lili Lynton, one of Mr. Boulud’s two partners. “Even the chef was baffled. We looked at everything and we finally realized — it was this reduction sauce, a really expensive reduction sauce, with truffles and mushrooms, which was in a bunch of dishes. Who would have thought? We figured it was the fish or the chicken or the meat. It was like a game of Clue, and the culprit was the gravy.” [1]
If Daniel Boulud with his team of accountants has trouble uncovering hidden, multiplying costs - presuming they have best-in-class software, is the software good enough?
Answer: Maybe Avero has found that niche. Or that niche is still open (despite Avero's elite client base - Danny Meyer)
"Avero’s software gets you the 411 by downloading POS reports and morphing that raw data into valuable information you can use to improve and act on every aspect of the operation of a restaurant from menu planning—like how many lobster rolls did you sell for the last four years on Thursday nights when it was over 90 degrees out, what did Moms order most on Mother’s Day, or how many vegans are eating out on Friday nights in winter—to server performance and pinpointing the server who’s, say, strongest in cocktail sales but weakest in wine sales...
10,000 food and beverage professionals in 1100+ restaurants—guys like Danny Meyer and Steve Hanson—use his software. And thanks to Avero, his clients have realized an incremental $100 million in profits." [2]
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/business/17boulud.html?pag...
I don't really know how you would solve that particular problem in software; it's more of a process problem. Restaurants differentiate from fast food in part by not serving precisely the same thing every time, so that makes it hard to track costs per dish very precisely, not to mention things like shrink. It's still possible to get a rough idea though, which is better than they're doing now.
Avero looks pretty sexy, I'll check into it a bit more. Thanks for the link.
You're spot on when you say they're running about 5 years behind everyone else (if not more).
My personal take is that the next generation of operators will likely be more receptive and will see the value in using different forms of media and accepting that people get their information in very different ways than even 5 years ago. I think there are other ways to make money in the restaurant industry, if I was someone looking to do something in this industry I'd start making some connections with the US Foods and the Syscos of the world, alone you'll be lucky to even get face time with an operator, let alone convince them to use your product.
If anyone is interested one of the restaurants that used the service was here http://www.edinagrill.com, access from your iphone/android/blackberry and you'll see a mobile version vs normal browser.
What's worse still is that it took the iPhone not supporting Flash for everyone to realize that Flash actually isn't needed for most things.
In the case of restaurants, it's even worse though. These are the kinds of businesses that people will want to look up information about while they are out (and presumably away from a desktop/laptop with internet access). So making it inaccessible to the kind of people that would want to look for your hours before deciding to become your customer is a detriment to you bottom-line.
Note that it mostly has to do with iPhone/Android making web browsing on a phone a less painful experience. Phones had browsers before that didn't support Flash.
If their menu is so fancy that it can't be easily translated into HTML, they're missing the point entirely.
Often, it's nearly impossible to find the one authoritative website on a restaurant, bar, or store - the one owned by that business. Instead, search engine result pages tend to be dominated by crappy Yellow pages entries that may or may not include the correct phone number of the place, but never photos, the menu or the hours.
Right now, if you want to book a special event for Valentine's Day, you have to go from site to site, hoping restaurants have updated recently (fat chance), and then contact them to see if they have a booking. Would be so much simpler to pick the event, the locale and then see a list of options including whether they were already booked out.
With a database of restaurant phone numbers, the polling of data could be automated. Robo-dial a restaurant at a less-than-busy time with "This is Service X. Are you doing anything special for Event Name? If the usual, press 1. If a special menu, press 2. If you never want us to pester you again, press 0." Then receive and transcribe the eventual descriptions.
Could have an automated call handling capacity too. "Are you booked out for Event Name? Press 1 for no, or press 2 if you are booked out. Hit 0 to stop these messages."
All HTML and CSS, hours, phone #, and address all on the front page. Menu is in HTML and kept up to date.
I do host the website and keep the menu up to date for them, though.
My solution for restaurant-website-woes, especially for simple things like hours: phone. Their automated answerer will probably tell you before you could navigate their site. Especially with Goog 411, I rarely use my computer for business phone numbers any more.
What I wonder is why should they care? I think that the success of a restaurant depends far more on the food, service, and setting of the restaurant itself. Setting aside we discerning HN readers, very few people choose where to eat based on web design.
I have a theory from observations of restaurants in my city. The restaurants with neon "OPEN" signs in front tend to be more empty than the ones without the OPEN sign. This is across all price points and styles. My thinking is that they are not filling tables, so think they need to let people know they are open and to come eat there. If people are not eating at your restaurant, will making a good quality website with accurate hours help you?
Google maps on the iphone gets me the phone number. If I have to see a menu, UrbanSpoon or Yelp works sometimes. I don't even bother with mobile browsers.
http://shakeshack.com/ (Nope, I'm completely off-base here. Shake Shack has a lovely, flash-free, pdf-free mobile version. Apologies to Danny Meyer and company.)
http://barstuzzichini.com/index.asp
I should send them a snapshot of what their websites look like with ClickToFlash installed.
(This suggests that on an iPhone, you're toast if you surf there.)
The nearby Standburger does much better, and their toasted marshmallow shake is the wife's favorite anyhow.
@Mikeryan, you are completely right. I was going there as you replied. I edited my post above to note that.
Weirdly, Tabla (same owner) does not have an alternative website for mobile.
Kudos to them for handling this well.
So, "Website" that's totally ignoring me, I apologize for accusing you of being Flash, when in reality it's your advertising and marketing decision makers who are clueless.
Before, they didn't even show up in Google's results for "Atlanta sushi". Now they've actually got some content to index. I get that it's easy to market flashy sites, but it's also easy to market search engine optimization too.
rest: I can't see the video.
dev: you have to use Google Chrome.
rest: I Googled Chrome. It took me to a picture of YouTube. Is my video on YouTube?
dev: no - that's a picture of a browser with YouTube in it. You have to download it. The browser I mean.
rest: I already have a browser. It's called Firefox Explorer or something.
dev: No you have to use this one. It's the best.
rest: but it says beta. Doesn't that mean it's not done?
dev: it's fine. It's better than your browser.
rest: How is it better than my browser? My customers don't even have that browser.
dev: because it's a standard. So everyone has to use it.
rest: I want my Flash site back.
dev: No! Flash is bad! It's not open source.
rest: I'd rather be open for business...
la la la
rest: I can't see the video.
dev: There is no video. You're a bloody restaurant, not Lady Gaga.
dev: NO FONT FOR YOU!
waiter: good choice. [minutes later] Here's your meal. Enjoy =)
customer: WTF? What is this? Is this… is it... cat food?
waiter: it's what you ordered. See on the foil in big letters it spells out "Whiskas Lamb and Wild Rice." Enjoy =)
customer: I can't eat that! It's gross!
waiter: oh please. According to our pushy web developer, flashy presentation is overrated. It's food, it's edible. Enjoy =)
customer: but it will taste terrible!
waiter: Have you seen Jakob Nielsen's website? Taste is irrelevant.
customer: but this isn't even people food.
waiter: you're not Lady Gaga.
[apologies for flogging / not letting this go... I couldn't resist the opportunity to mix Whiskas and Nielsen together in the same bad joke... I need help.]
I'm sure they hate Flash too (don't we all?) but for entirely different reasons from those discussed in the submission.
While I agree that restaurants could do well to have iPhone accessible store hours, I don't think it's totally unrealistic to phone in and politely ask the maître d’.
People who submit stories: please submit the URL of the article, not the anchor-laden URL of the comments.
This happens all the time, and it's annoying.
Thank you.
It's a spin-off of campusfood.com, so it has online ordering capabilities built-in.
I'm not affiliated but I did meet the founders at SUWMem.
Don't most people use exactly everything else than the restaurants website and instead yelp.com, allmenus.com.