Why are restaurant websites so awful? Because of restaurant culture.
slate.com
slate.com
I told him (and he seemed to agree) that he needed a simple website that was the following
- No Flash, just HTML5/CSS.
- No music/sound at all
- No long story about the owner, style, etc. If I'm here, I'm likely already sold, just let me know how to get there. At most, a short line on what Takoyaki is, since many Americans in Ohio are unfamiliar with it.
- One page only (SEO people will cringe, but its better than Flash likely and easier to maintain.
- Basic information given upfront: Name, address, Google Maps widget, phone number, hours and their standard menu which consists of 5 items. Mention to check Facebook/Twitter for specials (thinking of maintainability). Making sure none of the items are done as photos, which is a favorite of auto repair and sales places for unknown reasons.
- Very basic colors and formatting. Ugly? Yes. But if I'm on my iPhone and looking for dinner, I don't care. I just need the details.
- Links to their Facebook and Twitter accounts (maybe widgets for each if he wants to get fancy).
- Google Analytics for long term tracking
- Maybe a photo of the front of the establishment, didn't need to be fancy, just something a person who looked online would recognize when they were looking for it. No photos of the owner, etc.
I don't claim to be an expert here, but this is what I want to see when I visit a website. Again, some of these are technically bad for SEO, but that isn't the point. Functionality should always trump SEO in my opinion.
I actually even offerred that I do this for him for some free Takoyaki, since literally it sounds like 20 minutes in Textmate and then just throwing a static page up. Might stop by later this week to confirm the details. I'd rather see a local business do it right than wrong.
Spend a little time creating some really nice restaurant websites for a small number of your favourite local places (ones with either no website or a terrible website), offer it for free, with free hosting, and free updates, in return for free meals.
Get a few of those done, and spend a few days a week eating out for free, in the knowledge that you're helping friendly local businesses whose services you've always enjoyed.
When websites become more appreciated as a source of revenue then they will be taken seriously enough to actually improve. The big problem today is that whereas it's easy to show someone a competing restaurant and see how popular it is, it's a lot more difficult to see the effectiveness of other restaurants' websites since all of that data is more or less invisible to anyone but the owner.
1) If you have live acts performing at your establishment Friday-Sunday, the website can raise awareness.
2) Specialty products / menu items.
3) Paraphernalia / SWAG from the restaurant.
4) Take out -- order online, pick up in store.
5) If you sell things like coffee beans, web presence increases the number of eyeballs on your product.
At the end of the day, restaurants are about putting bodies in chairs and serving them food. Thus, the focus of a good website should be increasing traffic into the restaurant.
One way I could see functionality between restaurant and website would be linking time-to-wait dynamically with the website. So if I go to a restaurant's website, I could see # of people waiting and average time to wait for the evening. This does go back to putting bodies in seats, but it would better link web presence with what actually happens in the restaurant.
Good idea; just make sure to check that Google Voice allows that kind of commercial use before hanging a business off it.
I wonder if similar opportunities exist in the restaurant space.
Who would even think to look for a restaurant's own page?
Also, I've actually given up on all websites of non-internet companies, including big retailers. It's just too tedious to find information, too slow loading. Their mobile sites often load quicker. but have even less info. You're better off ringing them.
(BTW: the kind of info I'm talking about is like opening hours - and often when they do post that info... it's wrong Yes. It is actually worse than useless).
I notice that regular customers mostly use Yelp, OpenTable or just plain Google to look up a restaurant's phone number or location. That suggests to me that they've learned that going to the actual web site is usually a bad bet.
Who the hell picks a restaurant by conducting a websearch to compare features as if entrees were laptops? I'm sure someone does, but most people pick a restaurant because they have been there and know what they are in for, or because someone they know has been there and recommended it.
Also, if you or anyone you know is the slightest bit fussy when it comes to food, it's worth knowing in advance. For example I love pretentious restaurants where what the food looks like on the plate is important. My dad, on the other hand, doesn't - he wants basic food that tastes good, and plenty of it (admitedly I enjoy that too..), not original creations in small portions. He wants chips, not dauphinoise potatoes.
My sister on the other hand doesn't care about the type of cooking, but is very fussy on what she wants to eat in a restaurant. There are literally a few dishes she wants to eat, most of which are likely to be found in grill restaurants, pub restaurants, etc. So, whenever I'm eating with either of them, it's good to be able to look up the type of food available.
edit: Oh, and another case - when you need a restaurant and neither you nor people you know have any experience to base your choice on. What harm is there in taking a look at menus and trying to guess which you will like more. Maybe you'll still pick a bad one, but at least you tried not to.
I'm planning on posting it to HN for review in a few days.
If anyone wants a peak now, drop me an email.
What about "Facebook for restaurants"?
I know what about.me is, and if he pitched it to me, I would think, "a one page website for restaurants."
And, for the record, Tech Crunch has mentioned about.me tons of times: http://techcrunch.com/search/about.me
The about.me style sounds like a good idea as well, for those that want a super low budget, no frills site. But a menu would be nice, even on something like that.
(Though I have to admit, there was a time when I actively looked for those sites. I made some good money going to restaurants and other small businesses around town offering to convert their sites from un-editable flash to a simple, skin-able CMS I had whipped up. They were always skeptical until I said "never pay for changing text or prices on your site again". After that, they were my customer and no longer the customer of the wannabe-techno-hipster that sold them the original contract for site and "updates".)
If a web design agency builds a site that doesn't work on the iPhone or iPad, which are both now considered critical to restaurant marketing, they get to charge extra for creating an iOS specific version, or an app, or whatever. If you create one site that works great on everything, you make less money.
Restaurants are also sometimes run dreadfully. There's a particular type of chef that just cannot delegate, cannot let go of the details. Some of the biggest names are barely breaking even - in recent news the "best restaurant in the world" shut down, having never made a profit!
Then there's communication: People running restaurants are often all over the country, hard to get hold of, it's quite difficult to get decisions made.
On splash screens etc: If the client wants it, they want it. You can try to talk them out of it but at the end of the day if they insist, you gotta build it, and sometimes what they ask for just isn't easily possible without flash (sorry!)
It's a bit unfair to pick on restaurants, to be honest. Pick a random, non-chain business off your high street. How good is their website? How many of them use flash? A lot of low-end websites are still in that quagmire, but the meat of it is that you don't need to visit the website for most of these businesses but for restaurants the web has become critical, so you notice it more.
Lastly, to anyone out there that does make restaurant websites: Push back. Try to explain to your clients why it's not such a great idea to use flash, or intro screens. Try to explain the use-cases etc, and above all show them there is a very good business case for having a good website. My current employer actually specialises in restaurant websites and I'm really, genuinely proud of what we're doing - and our clients love it too. It takes effort and it's risky, but helping your client have the best website possible can pay off.
Edit: Between this article and the recent attack from Cracked, I'm feeling a little under siege, especially as both were fairly light on actual facts. An issue that came up in both:
> This is because restaurants often don't have tools to update the text on their sites—saving and replacing a PDF file of a menu is easier than messing with the code on the site
This is a horrible simplification. In many cases the PDF menu is produced by a design agency, which is certainly a lot more effort than updating text on a website. It's also not hard to code either a PDF uploader or a page text editor or both, but you'll find plenty pick the PDF uploader. If you spent that sort of money on a PDF, you'd want to upload it too! And of course the menus are often very designed and they want that control (which the article does cover on other points)
My question on this issue is: Is a PDF download really so bad? It's not something I personally find particularly intrusive and for a restaurant menu it seems suitable enough.
Sure, an established, profitable restaurant should have no trouble funding a modest, tidy, professionally built site. But the truth is, most restaurants youre visiting aren't "established" and "profitable."
1) Restaurants could jam their hours and menu onto a free theme for much less money than they spend getting a bespoke Flash monstrosity and be vastly more usable, yet do the latter anyway. 2) There are lots of cash-strapped small businesses around that don't have as uniformly unusable websites as restaurants.
The issue is not money.
I trust their judgment, so we can just agree to disagree on this I suppose.
Actually, that Flash monstrosity with animations and music playing is the cheap option. You don't even need a coder to produce a website like that, just a designer (whereas you usually need at minimum a designer + a coder to build an HTML website). The thing about sucky websites is that they are made by sucky companies, and sucky companies are cheap! (Also many sucky websites are made by very good companies that just have no choice when a repeat client only has a pittance for a new site)
That part struck me as well, because it's complete and utter bullshit. The tools exist, they've been implemented for years across a variety of industries and they come in all flavors. There should be no need for a restaurant operator to ever have to get on the phone with their technologist, and I use that term loosely, and request an item change and any developer with a couple of years experience should know that.
The reason they're so shitty, imo, is that restauranteurs are ocd-minded workaholics who spend most of their time focusing on their own operation and very little time researching the technology aspects of their industry or comparing themselves outside of their business column. Just pick up any of their trade publications. They simply don't have the time or the inclination and more often than not the money to go out and hire a bonafide design or technology firm to implement a solution for them. They see what other restaurants are doing, calculate the costs of copying them and call it a day. As long as nobody else is innovating, why should they?
Another aspect of the business that leads to poor internet marketing is the people that they have filling those positions. I'm willing to bet that upwards of 90% of the people who make the decisions on the restaurant's website have a) no business experience, b) no technology experience, c) no desire to be anything than someone who works at a restaurant, as long as they don't have to serve food or pour drinks. They are, and having worked in the industry for many years, mostly an underachieving lot who are most happy sucking down a cold beer that a friendly bartender comped them. Seriously, I build web-based, cross-platform financial applications and my restaurant friends still ask me to help them with the Yelp. They have absolute no clue what the internet has become in the past ten or twelve years. And if they can get their favorite cocktail waitress' friend to put together some crap website, then they're just as happy. More often than not, you'll have to print the pages out and send the paper site along with the invoice so they can look it over.
It's getting better, but it's still a hassle to download and open a pdf. Well-designed html is much preferred for me. That said, a well-designed PDF that downloads quickly is better than a poorly-designed menu section that loads slowly or worse, is inaccurate.
Salon had an article about this last year: http://www.salon.com/food/francis_lam/2010/02/22/how_menus_m...
In a restaurant, we're in "impulse buy mode", and menus may be oriented around maximizing our impulse buys. Almost without exception, people looking at a website are in research/decision mode, and the same presentation in both makes for a crappy experience.
Rather than using the same stupid layout/pricing tricks in a crappy PDF on a website, they should be using 'tricks' like showing us the hours of the restaurant so we know if we drive 20 minutes there they'll be open, or the 'trick' of answering your emails as quickly as you answer your phone (indeed, another trick might be answering your phone pleasantly with clear, paced speech that most people can understand).
Ummm... isn't that all the more reason to make sure it's accessible on a mobile, is enticing to the user with relevant content, and assists them in making a sale (reservation) with ease?
When I click a dinner menu link and it opens as HTML and not as a PDF document, I get a quick sense of relief and greatly appreciate it. Can't stand PDF menus, sorry.
I think a key attraction to the PDF menu download is that it allows them replicate their menu layout and style on their website. A menu change or update would require a website update otherwise (i.e. if the design changes) and that's real dollars.
The response was overwhelmingly PDF menus, only for the simplicity of the workflow. Despite a demonstration of how easy it was to use the CMS to update the menu they really just didn't want to spend the time doing that.
There is exactly one reason why most restaurants have bad websites, and that is money. The average price they're willing to pay for a website is $500-1800. It's rare to hear of one paying over $2,500. It's not necessarily that they're cheap, it's that they have no money, or think they don't need it at all, so only want the bare minimum. The good restaurants don't need a website, they have a two hour wait every time it isn't raining, and the restaurants that do need a good website have no money.
Most people grossly overestimate the profitability and ease of running a restaurant. I estimate that as many as 40% of restaurants are run unprofitably in perpetuity because the economics of the location are impossible. The owner purchases the restaurant, runs it for two or three years, runs out of money, sells it to the new owner who runs it unprofitably for two or three years, runs out of money, and the cycle repeats. You probably sit in restaurants like this regularly and think, "This place must be a goldmine, it's always packed." It isn't, it's a money pit and the next guy that buys it is going to discover that as well. If you are thinking of starting a restaurant to make money, I suggest you purchase the land and build a building that can house a restaurant, then lease the space to someone else, it's the only reliable way.
Running a restaurant is also a lot more difficult than most people think, and many owners amplify the difficulty by having little or no business management experience or training. They got into it thinking it would be easy, and thought they could handle it because they've been eating in restaurants forever. Take order, cook food, serve food, simple stuff, right? Restaurant employees are always stealing from the restaurant, especially the bartenders. Customers can be very, very difficult. The staff will be flaky. There will be problems, constantly and forever. It's not easy.
If a website was essential, it would be worth borrowing to get one made.
Is it not, or are they unable?
They have to borrow to open, and costs are always higher than expected. This causes them to cut things from their budget, like websites. They can't get more credit later because the business isn't putting up the numbers and they are already having difficulty paying all their bills. A banker will hand you an umbrella when it's sunny, and take it away as soon as it starts raining.
Well... why bother cleaning the outside of your restaurant - washing the windows, trimming the landscaping, cleaning around the dumpster, etc? They've already put so much effort in to making the inside of the restaurant look perfect, why duplicate that effort?
A good website - fast loading, clean info, nice pics, optimized for the web - gets people to decide to spend money with you by coming in. A nice custom menu gets people to decide how they'll spend money with you (and how much).
This shouldn't be an either/or decision, but it appears the majority of owners don't think this far ahead. Given the little I've known about restaurant owners (worked in a few restaurants growing up), this is not at all surprising.
The good website you are describing probably costs at least $5k, which is more than they have to spend. It also means they have to find someone that can do the work, tell them what they want, pay them, manage them, and evaluate the output. It's time consuming and expensive.
I think you're seriously mis-representing that story. First of all the restaurant didn't shut down because it wasn't making money, but because Ferran (the head chef/owner) simply wanted to do something else. Secondly Ferran has stated several times that running the restaurant at a loss is a conscious decision. He could easily turn a profit, but that would mean being open all year (the restaurant was only open 6 month of the year), charging higher prices, and compromising on the food, non of which he had any interest in doing. He sees owning the "best restaurant in the world" as a marketing tool, and a place to park his R&D expenditure for his other food ventures, and more than makes up for those losses with his other food businesses.
I much prefer a PDF menu. In fact I actively look for a menu download link when I eat out, which is often. It reassures me that I'm seeing exactly the same menu that I'll see when I sit down at the table. Too often the website has a little bit of html showing a 'typical menu', and I'm left simply not knowing if the food on the site is the food you're offering tonight.
But when I see a PDF that's clearly exactly what was sent to the menu printing company, that's perfect. Too often I've sat down in a restaurant, looked over the menu and thought "actually, there's nothing here I really fancy".
Similarly, just because you have a PDF menu doesn't mean they have the food on the menu.
PDF menus that simply say "daily soup" or "ask for our specials" are pretty much designed for in-store use only, and basically useless on the web for decision making. When you're in a restaurant already seated, you can deal with uncertainty by ordering something different. When you're on the web, you deal with uncertainty by going someplace else altogether.
My favorite restaurant (contigosf.com) just uploads a jpg of the menu - kinda unfortunate, but on the plus side they update it daily.
I noticed medium sized bands tended to have the same godawful outdated website style, especially European metal bands. No idea if it is still like that -- I just started avoiding any such "official" pages.
With liquor I always thought that it was that 1) some brands have trouble differentiating themselves 2) the desire to create a 'culture' around their beverage--and that seems to fit the OP's description of the restaurant industry
Although it's an instance of dated web concepts AND it features the dreaded 10 second Flash load wait time, it is an impressive achievement. If only in a "Winchester House" kind of way.
http://www.thecheesecakefactory.com/menu/Side+Dishes/fresh_b...
Mobile websites are more than putting a mobile template on. Contrast Shake Shack with Walmart's http://walmart.com (on a mobile device)
> 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.
> 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.
For a credible, sexy Open Table competitor: check out http://averoinc.com
Note: Some comments taken out of context from the threads linked below. I linked to these threads because they contain some good previous discussions about the restaurant industry and their systems. OpenTable is a reservation system (as refulgentis has pointed out).
These comments taken out of context from previous related discussions on News.YC:
"The hell that is a restaurant website"
http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=1130419
"Is OpenTable worth it?"
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1904689
"Why are restaurant websites so bad?"
Everything else rings true. We have to invest a lot of time into each prospect because they're used to buggy systems that have feature overload and as a result are hard to use and impossible to setup. We're selling at a ridiculously low price ($999 for unlimited device licensing as a single site), and we're doing well, but the time investment into each prospect is very high.
It's been over a year since I was looking at POS systems, but that's what I remembered (might be bad memory tho!)
To enjoy the full website you need Flash 9 or greater. Please visit this website using a web browser with Flash 9 or greater installed. DOWNLOAD IT HERE.
no comment
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The mobile site is kinda cute but a mess in terms of usability:
On http://shakeshack.com/mobile/menu/ links are not marked.
On http://shakeshack.com/mobile/locations/ everything looks like a link.
On eg http://shakeshack.com/mobile/menu/citifield.php the categories are not divided well, it is not clear where the category "text icons" belong to.
http://shakeshack.com/mobile/shackfans/ is serving huge (multiple hundreds of kilobytes) photos.
I would not call that a good example. The idea and structure is good(!) but execution is not so great.
I'm sorry but the author of this article has obviously missed the following sites built by the UK based company Engage Interactive. These guys have nailed the UK market and make awesome restaurant websites for some of the biggest chains / names.
www.strada.co.uk
www.bellaitalia.co.uk
www.caferouge.co.uk
www.giraffe.net
They feature exactly what you want, and they do it well. All of these sites make you want to eat in the Restuarants.
They also do www.pocketdiner.co.uk which redirects mobile traffic to a mobile version of the sites.
The culture at these restaurants is nothing like what is being described in the article. So all together I'm not sure where the author is coming from.
The sites you list above are in my opinion really great examples of what restaurant websites could and should be. There are also other agencies in the UK delivering really well such as Ignite Hospitality and Evolving.
Thing about fashion is that it's more about brand than usability. They get a lot of their sales from their boutiques, net-a-porter, or other 3rd parties.
Regarding the article; people have already touched on the main points, i.e. accessibility (html vs flash vs pdf) and content (essentials vs fluff), so there's not much to add here. However, I do feel Schema (something we've worked on a lot), will become more and more important.
Cheers
This actually has a name: 'Mystery Meat Navigation'[1]. It's one of the most irritating usability ailments. I thought it was extinct by now, but apparently it's still used on restaurant sites. It used to be quite popular on art- and band-related sites, some ten years ago.
Bay Cities: http://www.baycitiesitaliandeli.com/ Swingers: http://www.swingersdiner.com/
Is this SF local news? If so, why is it on HN?
What do you guys think about this? Other local companies we're gonna focus on are hotels, sportclubs, hairdresser, beautsaloon, garage, ...
But I'll reiterate, even thought the point has already been made a million times: not providing a web site that can be viewed on an iOS device is criminally insane, particularly for restaurants which frequently would be accessed by mobile devices.
I think Hubert Keller is a genius as a chef, but I have no idea what the connection is between the last two sentences and the first two. He's cool; the restaurant is successful and good. What does that have to do with the website, which is truly god-awful.
Here's what I see when I open it in Safari on OSX Lion (stock - Flash is not installed): http://cl.ly/9AsG.
If anything, an interesting chef at a good restaurant - with a website this awful is the best example. It shows that even (otherwise) smart people and successful restaurants fall into this trap.
While I'm here, a favorite post on this theme: http://venomousporridge.com/post/389785000/a-conversation-i-...
[1] HN discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1130419