Why are restaurant web sites so bad?
juliansanchez.com
juliansanchez.com
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.
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.
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.
I help run a local dance and have been looking for a simple, small POS setup to help tally people (students, adults, seniors, and association members) through the door. Right now we put tick marks in a log book.
I was thinking about developing a jQuery / PHP / PostgreSQL system with nightly updates to Google Docs. Something that would run on a 5-year old laptop.
They are a bit under the radar but are solving these problems in realtime within a huge market.
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.
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.
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.
I have a job at a web agency now and doing anything better than what's there simply wouldn't make since.
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?
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.
But I do really love the idea that there's a dialectic between the virtual world of websites/internet and restaurant work -- which is so deeply grounded in the physical. And that there's some meaning here, that these things do not reconcile well, and the lameness of the web presence of restaurants is a living manifestation of this disjunction.
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.:
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.
I say go for it.
We have been trying to crack in to this niche for almost two years with our http://patientboost.com/default.html service but it is a damn challenging market.
Its been at the top of my list of software I have basically no interest in working on yet feel like I could do a hell of a lot better at anyway. Of course, I haven't researched what's out there, there may already be much better options available.
Besides being ugly, my main beef is that I have watched her drag photos, one at a time, into their proper slots in my "file" from the incoming area, even though they were already clearly labelled as to what tooth they were pictures of. It's maddening. It's only a minute or two, and she doesn't take pictures every visit, but it's the kind of thing that just screams shoddy workmanship... and opportunity.
Are you certain that is a software problem? It could well be a user education problem, or a trust issue between dentist and program.
Having a good website will get you a competitive advantage in the market segment I'm a part of. (And my segment, people who don't want to deal with automated call systems or dead trees of phone numbers is growing every day.)
However if you are offering Cosmetic Dentistry, each new client can worth thousands of dollars and people will travel from their immediate surrounding to go reach your dentist practice.
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.
You can't make money if you can't even get customers in the door!
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.
(I realize I could probably crawl through the source on your page and just take it, but that seems rude without asking.)
You'd want to put that CSS in a separate file and include it like this:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="print.css" />
The important bit is the media="print". Look at mine all you like, nice of you to consider asking :)
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...
That's what shell scripts are for. It is trivial to write a script that will accept a LaTeX filename and run the necessary commands on it. It is only a little bit more work to add in hooks (e.g., to your IDE) such that the script is run automatically upon saving the file.
Moreover, with .tex files being plain-text, you could even write simple scripts to assist with updating the documents themselves. Something like "add-new-reference" or "update-hobbies" could accept input from the user and add it to the .tex file quite trivially.
This is in contrast to a GUI program, where you are basically forced to fire up a heavyweight editor, perform the changes by hand, and then perform each export one-by-one, also by hand. I know you could script old versions of OpenOffice using Java or Python, but that ends up being way more convoluted than doing the equivalent with a .tex file.
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://www.brasseriegerard.co.uk
Some of our older ones
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
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.
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
Bad web designers tend to target restaurants (and medical practitioners) because they have a much easier time selling bad design to them.
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?
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.
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?
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.
Cold calling? Anybody with similar experience? I’m genuinely interested.
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.
This just means that the problem needs to be attacked on a different front: marketing. Which is where the hucksters come in...
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.
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)
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.
it's based off of codeigniter, but it's fully OO. are you using some sort of ORM like active record? if you are, you should look at the tables and see how many joins the ORM layer is doing so you know how much work it's going to be to scale.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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...
But then I imagine explaining my idea to other people and having them ask "so, uhhm, like geocities?"
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.
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.
Eventually things like Google Places, Yelp, etc. will handle 100% of their UX.
Also note that movie websites have the same problem. For mostly the same reasons, though the organizations involved and cash transactions are much larger...
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.