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Comment by encoderer | Hacker News Reader

Another reason certainly is a lack of resources (cash) to commit to the project.

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."

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The restaurant website topic comes up frequently, and this is a frequent response. But there are two reasons it's clearly wrong:

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 think you are both right, once you "de-identify" said resources and cash. That is, the constraint here is not cash but brains/skills/knowledge/time/effort. Many people simply don't know what is possible. I used to run continuously into this kind of problem when I worked for other people (guys who just don't know what is _possible_, not even talking about being able to do it).

I work for a startup that sells to restaurants. This -- the money issue -- is what the sales guys who go into these places every day have told me when I asked them why they think the websites suck.

I trust their judgment, so we can just agree to disagree on this I suppose.

> for much less money than they spend getting a bespoke Flash monstrosity

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)

There are free options for hosting and website creation for HTML. $0 < Designer.

Wouldn't you agree that building a Flash site is harder, more expensive than a simple HTML/CSS site?

Absolutely not. You need a designer to design and build the entire thing in one application for the former, and someone to build the PSD, then slice it, write the HTML and CSS... Flash is a much faster workflow, and it's a workflow that more people are good enough at to make a passable website.

This is absolutely true and in the current climate not many small businesses (which is really what restaurants fall under, whether they are a tiny mom & pop or internationally renowned they are not typically very large organisations) can spare the cash to make a truly awesome website.

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