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Comment by exodust | Hacker News Reader

3-5 prompts doesn't get you a professional restaurant website.

The key word is professional. A good restaurant website begins with taking good photos of the premises and the food. AI won't come around to your business and take professional photos.

There's a lot of bits and pieces to a website for bookings, content management, menu updates, etc.

HTML templates and themes have been around for a long time. AI can basically spit out those templates and themes, which is great. But there's still a lot to do before you get to www.fancy-dining.com.

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Most restaurant websites don't have photos of the food. Certainly not professional ones. Pan around randomly on google maps then zoom in and find the nearest strip mall, then go down the line checking the websites of restaurants there. Most are generic crap and you'll be lucky if the menu online is even complete. If they have food photos it's probably smartphone pictures taken by the owner's kid.

I do this a lot, far more than I actually go to restaurants, because I like adding small business details to OSM. There are a few that have their shit together but the overwhelming majority do not.

You've evaluated a tiny sample of restaurant websites and extrapolated to make claims about the overwhelming majority - in the millions, across the globe.

"Most are generic crap" doesn't mean restaurants aim for that benchmark when they decide to get a website.

I'm not sure if you're refuting the point I was making, which I'll clarify. "Restaurant website" could be a stand-in for any basic small business website. The claim was that AI threatens small web dev agencies who make small business websites. I don't think it will, as millions of small businesses want something better than "generic crap" or cookie-cut AI copy paste; AND we've had site-building services, social media pages, and template-driven approaches for a long time.

> AI won't come around to your business and take professional photos.

Neither will a web developer?

> There's a lot of bits and pieces to a website for bookings, content management, menu updates, etc.

Bolt.new can handle all these quite easily. Although I know several restaurants with very simple websites that have a few pics, a menu and their hours.

No, but you can do the photos and have the AI fix them or make suggestions about them.

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