What alternatives are there to the ubiquitous "hamburger menu" for navigation that look good on both mobile and desktop?
Does anyone think that that static links are better than flyouts?
Does anyone think that that static links are better than flyouts?
Step one is to stop trying to make the same UI for mobile and desktop. You're guaranteed to end up with a result that is insultingly bad for at least one of those segments of your user base.
The worst is when the mobile version doesn't have those additional menu items at all, anywhere, and certain things are simply impossible to do on mobile.
Tossing the lower priority items onto an additional page (hamburger menu) when screen space is limited is often the fair and simple trade-off.
"Don't use hamburger menus" is often coupled with the hand-wavy "just create novel mobile UI that doesn't need it", but the reality is that the items in hamburger menus usually don't need their own top-level button on a small screen at all. That's why they're hidden behind a click. They aren't worth the clutter, but they're still things a user may want to do.
In my experience, seeing that just about everything uses the hamburger menu, like the Kindle, it's a concession users are willing to make in order to use a small device. What exactly is the trade-off here without downsides?
Only end users, but who cares about them?
1) Menu link, one of two important things on the entire site (the other one is hours) is buried in a hamburger menu
2) The menu is implemented as a fixed-size page designed for an iPad Mini (which they use as menus at the tables)
3) Different types of items (appetizers, entrees, pizza, drinks, etc) are in a horizontal bar across the top, with large font size. Since it's a fixed iPad Mini width, this scrolls horizontally. Less than half of them are visible at a time.
4) Individual items are listed by name, thumbnail photo, and price for each size. Want to know what toppings are on their "Eighth Street" pizza? Click on it! Then click to close that and click on the next menu item. Do this for each pizza, then try to remember what the one that sounded best was called, and probably go through half of them again to get back to it. Super efficient way to find which pizza you'd like.
I think the restaurant understands in concept that they should have a website, but I don't think they care to think about it beyond that.
EDIT: I just revisited this and you actually can get to the menu without the hamburger link. It's designed as one of those pages where the content is centered (vertically and horizontally) with a bunch of white space as a full page thing, so it doesn't look like you'd need to scroll, but there's actually more content (including a second link to the menu) if you try scrolling down.
I'll blame this partly on Apple for taking away the always visible scroll bar indicators and partly on this stupid web design trend of giant "paginated scrolling" pages that don't look like there's anything running off screen that you'd need to scroll to.
I think hamburger menus should not be used anywhere except in hamburger restaurants.
Why would a restaurant website need a hamburger menu (UI I mean, not the literal menu of hamburgers on offer)?
If the menu vendor had bothered with responsive design it wouldn't be half as bad, but "here's an iPad viewport centered in your browser" must have meet the contractual requirements.
A $10/month Squarespace subscription is pretty damn cheap and IIRC you don't need to know much of anything about web development to set that up.
And the cost of web development has never been lower.
This is in stark contrast to kitchen-related matters, which they are likely much more experienced at identifying and dealing with.
That the cost of web development has never been cheaper is a fact.
That the restaurant website is important -- that's how customers find out about it -- and shouldn't be left behind because of "small margins" is also not very controversial.
If the margins are so small as not to afford some $1000 (or less) for a decent website, then what other corners have been cut?