Yeah, setting up a website is a pain.
But in reality there’s only a handful of things people care about for your restaurant: what, when, and where. Put up your menu, put up your hours, and put up your location. And a phone number.
But in reality there’s only a handful of things people care about for your restaurant: what, when, and where. Put up your menu, put up your hours, and put up your location. And a phone number.
Built a menu editor. Has a built in blog and image galleries. Events calendar and event posts. Has a single page simple mode and multi page editor. Contact form with message intake and forwarding. Easy UI that I don’t change underfoot every quarter so its consistent. Works on mobile and low powered devices as well.
Kept the monthly price low and I’ve done cold emails, mailers, newspaper ads, online ads.
Still barely any takers. Probably a bit of a branding thing. Maybe its something else.
Potential customers want to see the menu (or product range or similar), location, a couple of pictures. It's supposed to give useful and necessary information. The intended purpose is:
Before: your cafe does not have a website.
After: your cafe has a simple website where people can see the menu, hours, and location.
This tool accomplishes that, and looks fine.
It's not supposed to give the viewer an aesthetic experience so novel and surprising, subverting the entire paradigm of cafe menus, to leave the viewer questioning reality and rethinking their entire approach to life.
I’m aiming for a mix of dazzle and simplicity.
Wix is at least $10 more per month. The intention is to keep the price low without making it impossible to afford to operate on a smaller scale.
Many small businesses have nothing approaching what tech businesses consider a low budget.
They opened the homepage and heard and/or felt their fans rev up, which didn't leave a good impression. They don't have confidence that your product/service is worth paying for (perhaps not worth using even if it were free).
There's nothing else to figure out.
You'd probably have better luck if you gave them an actual dotcom address, and you managed all of their online presence for them (Google Maps, Facebook, Instagram, etc.). But even then it's hard to compete with free, especially when your prospective customers are stingy.
Edit: I suppose you're also competing with Uber Eats. You can already see menus there, whether you want delivery or not.
I know it’s not popular with the crowd here, but those platforms are free, easy to use, and where the customers are. The mainstream options for a website like squarespace are absurdly expensive.
And 1/3 of the time, that photo is too blurry and off-angle and whatnot to even read properly.
Average person either finds the place through google maps or a TikTok video, checks a few photos of the food or venue, then goes. Doesn’t matter what the exact menu is because there are plenty of options and something will be appealing.
The conversational context did not involve anyone making any claims about the viability of businesses operating sans info. You can check—nowhere does the person who you're responding to (or any of the ancestor comments in this thread) write in their comment that companies are losing business because of the lack of up-to-date information, whether on their own site on through Google Maps.
The context is people, very reasonably, making a plea that that info be published on the open web.
But you're right, having a ton of good images on your website is one of the most important things for restaurants and most other businesses. And most fail in this aspect.
To be fair the Google maps restaurant side of the operation is quite possibly the largest ratio I've ever seen between "amount of capital and engineering skill available" and "quality (lack thereof) of UX." You have to access your restaurant profile through the Google search portal. It's a nightmare.
The restaurant is closed now, permanently.
You can see we updated it fairly regularly https://github.com/508-dev/thejispot/commits/main/
If you have long list of todos for a restaurant, why put building a website in the top 10?
It's those things but more as questions than things they want to read. What people actually care about for a restaurant is:
"Can you tell me if the food is good?"
"Can you tell me are the staff great?"
"Can you tell me what does it cost?"
and "Can you tell me where it is?" to an extent, especially if it's not on a major route.
People want answers that they can trust for those things. They want a trusted source to tell them the answers.
You can't really get any of those things from a Google search or a website (ignoring reviews because they're gamed to hell now). The majority of a restaurant's customers come from word-of-mouth recommendations or reputation through curated services like critics and directories especially at the top end. A good website helps for people who are visiting the area, or for restaurants that are very new and whose owners don't have a great network (or who wrongly believe a website is key to getting business), but for most restaurants the only way to drive business is to build a loyal base of people who tell their friends and colleagues about it.
If a restaurant is going to have a website at all it should be a great one, because bad websites shouldn't be a thing, but a restaurant could happily run for decades with just an Instagram page these days and it'd make no difference to their success.
Well they still need a website with a menu and hours or I'm not going to be there. You can't view an instagram page without an account.
> "Can you tell me are the staff great?"
> "Can you tell me what does it cost?"
> and "Can you tell me where it is?" to an extent, especially if it's not on a major route.
A restaurant's Instagram page - which is what this post is about - does not answer these questions in any way better than a restaurant's website does.