Though that leads to another source of aggrevation: restaurant websites that are never updated. Can't tell you how many now-closed restaurants still have a working site, for one. For another - if your menu changes daily and you don't update it on the web, don't put it there - or put a disclaimer or something!

(lost track of whether this is in the thread already)

Slate has an interesting article up concerning the topic of why restaurant websites suck.

Overdone - Why are restaurant websites so horrifically bad?

incite wrote:Slate has an interesting article up concerning the topic of why restaurant websites suck.

Overdone - Why are restaurant websites so horrifically bad?

Chicago's own Alinea also got jabbed, though I think it was nitpicking.

My wife called me the other day to tell me that she and my daughters were stopping at McDonalds and did I want anything (I forgive them, they know not what they do) so I tried to view their menu on my iphone, since I'm not familiar with their current menu. Not possible! The first screen if you are on a mobile device is a welcome screen for mobile users. There is a link to the nutrition info for every item they have had in the last several years, but no current menu. Clicking on the link to view their full web site gives you the same mobile welcome screen.

McDonalds is one of, or maybe the largest restaurant chain in the world and their menu is not accessible from a mobile device. Just one more reason not to go there (as if I needed any more reason to.) Epic failure.

I always get the tasting menu there...so I don't burden myself with having to make menu selections.

milz50 wrote:I always get the tasting menu there...so I don't burden myself with having to make menu selections.

Do you call ahead to tell the chef that you're coming?

jesteinf wrote:

milz50 wrote:I always get the tasting menu there...so I don't burden myself with having to make menu selections.

Do you call ahead to tell the chef that you're coming?

Aboslutely...I just ask him to cook for me.

So I can do a Plotnicki at McDonalds? Would they make me a special Big Mac with truffles?

Here's one of my favorite (bad) restaurant websites. I suppose bad isn't a fair term. Someone spent a lot of time to come up with this final result.

http://www.macarenatapasnaperville.com/

If you click around, eventually a video of a man will come up and explain how to use the website. I assume because the site is so unintuitive.

pancake wrote:Here's one of my favorite (bad) restaurant websites. I suppose bad isn't a fair term. Someone spent a lot of time to come up with this final result.

http://www.macarenatapasnaperville.com/

If you click around, eventually a video of a man will come up and explain how to use the website. I assume because the site is so unintuitive.

The image on the right looks like a Man of War jellyfish.

Noel wrote:Found this thread through a friend, funny stuff.

I actually design restaurant websites, so it's always nice seeing what you guys want. Beyond the actual design though, what I find most important these days is actually being connected, i.e. in particular Yelp (35% of their users do it through their mobiles, looking for somewhere to eat, shop, etc.) and Foursquare. Facebook & Twitter are great for your regulars, but the former two is where a lot of the new business is at. Pretty websites are great, if people actually see them

In contrast the writer of the Slate article on bad sites said:

I did get a plausible-sounding explanation of the design process from Tom Bohan, who heads up Menupages, the fantastic site that lists menus of restaurants in several large cities. "Say you're a designer and you've got to demo a site you've spent two months creating," Bohan explains. "Your client is someone in their 50s who runs a restaurant but is not very in tune with technology. What's going to impress them more: Something with music and moving images, something that looks very fancy to someone who doesn't know about optimizing the Web for consumer use, or if you show them a bare-bones site that just lists all the information? I bet it would be the former—they would think it's great and money well spent."

Not coincidentally, designers make more money to create a complicated, multipage Flash site than one that tells you everything you want to know on one page. Bohan, for one, isn't complaining about the terrible state of restaurant websites. Menupages, which lists each restaurant in its database by menu, operating hours, price, and address, is one of several sites that benefits from bad restaurant pages. (Yelp and Urbanspoon are also good resources.) Menupages' menus are formatted as Web pages, whereas many restaurants require you to spend time downloading a PDF file. 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. But, again, this reduces usability, and pushes people to use third-party sites.

Which is it? Or can both be true, depending on the restaurant owner?

It's too bad so many restaurant owners have forgotten the great rule of KISS "Keep it simple, stupid."

pancake wrote:Here's one of my favorite (bad) restaurant websites. I suppose bad isn't a fair term. Someone spent a lot of time to come up with this final result.

http://www.macarenatapasnaperville.com/

If you click around, eventually a video of a man will come up and explain how to use the website. I assume because the site is so unintuitive.

Love it. This must have been done around the advent of the internet, when people didn't know how it worked.

I don't know if my screen is especially dark, but the "man" is just a head, a shirt and tie, and two waving hands. Hilarious.

If you click around, eventually a video of a man will come up and explain how to use the website. I assume because the site is so unintuitive.

But the man says the site is simple and easy to navigate!

Flash has destroyed the internet. The original purpose of the web was the simple sharing of usable information, not high concept arty crap, give me straight HTML any day. I guess that is why we like LTH, huh?

You apparently have forgotten GeoCities and Angelfire websites circa mid-90s. Or, heck, even user-designed MySpace pages from not-too-long-ago. Flash did not destroy the internet. Bad design is bad design, regardless of whether it's Flash or HTML. Flash is overused, and makes it that much easier to come up with crappy bells & whistles that do nothing for the surfing experience but slow it down. But, come, on. Don't you remember stuff like this? (Link to parody of GeoCities-era sites.)

Binko wrote:But, come, on. Don't you remember stuff like this? (Link to parody of GeoCities-era sites.)

I loved Dysfunctional Family Circus.

riddlemay wrote:

Binko wrote:But, come, on. Don't you remember stuff like this? (Link to parody of GeoCities-era sites.)

I loved Dysfunctional Family Circus.

If you love Dysfunctional Family Circus, you'll adore the Nietzsche Family Circus.

Binko wrote:You apparently have forgotten GeoCities and Angelfire websites circa mid-90s. Or, heck, even user-designed MySpace pages from not-too-long-ago. Flash did not destroy the internet. Bad design is bad design, regardless of whether it's Flash or HTML. Flash is overused, and makes it that much easier to come up with crappy bells & whistles that do nothing for the surfing experience but slow it down. But, come, on. Don't you remember stuff like this? (Link to parody of GeoCities-era sites.)

That's pretty funny. Of course you are right about bad design, but flash design is mostly done by professional "designers". The problem is that as artists they are OK, but they have little or no programming skills and don't understand good interface design standards. You end up with really great looking sites with impossible to decipher content hidden behind impossible to navigate user interfaces. At least with the Geocities sites, I could find everything I was looking for, because it was on one bottomless page. Not a very sophisticated GUI, but at least if you could find the scroll bar, you knew how to navigate it.

EvA wrote:If you love Dysfunctional Family Circus, you'll adore the Nietzsche Family Circus.

You're right!

d4v3 wrote:Flash has destroyed the internet.

I wouldn't go that far, but there's a reason why Flash is used so much on websites despite so many people hating it.

Natrurally, I was being hyperbolic, but thanks for the link about flash LSOs. I recently installed a new browser that didn't have all the cookie permisions set, so it asks me everytime flash wanrts to store something on my local disk. I was alarmed at how often that happened. I am not sure that is entirely why flash is used so often in lieu of Java (which is more efficient, less proprietary and more security conscious) but I am sure it is a contributing factor.

Pie Lady wrote:

pancake wrote:Here's one of my favorite (bad) restaurant websites. I suppose bad isn't a fair term. Someone spent a lot of time to come up with this final result.

http://www.macarenatapasnaperville.com/

If you click around, eventually a video of a man will come up and explain how to use the website. I assume because the site is so unintuitive.

Love it. This must have been done around the advent of the internet, when people didn't know how it worked.

I don't know if my screen is especially dark, but the "man" is just a head, a shirt and tie, and two waving hands. Hilarious.

What I really love about this site, is that the only button you can really see to click on is "Replay." As if once wasn't far more than enough!

Hi- Somehow I missed the video, but if you read the comments left on the site, at least half of them mention how terrible the website is. It seems like they would have corrected it by now.

Has anybody eaten here? There were some very good reviews under the comment section. Several people commented how reasonable the restaurant is. The menu is practically useless though. You cannot scroll through it slow enough to actually read it, and it lists no prices. rarely get to Naperville, and so I guess I will have to miss the restaurant. Thanks, Nancy

It's been a long time since this thread was updated, but I'd like to nominate Latinicity as the restaurant website that does the most to actively drive users away from their business:

1. When you go to the URL, the first thing you see is popup for their Sunday Brunch. It completely covers all the information on anything else - until you click the 'close' button on the top-right, there is no indication that they offer anything other than Sunday Brunch.

2. When you click 'counters' or try to scroll down, you have to sit through a brief-but-slow flash animation (which periodically freezes) before you can even see the information that you sought. Which repeats when you try to go back to the previous section.

3. Hours and location are not prominently featured on the main page (the one hidden under the brunch popup).

4. When you finally click on 'Contact' to get the hours and location, the map that pops up isn't centered on the restaurant. Instead, it's on the bottom of the page, and since it's a white logo on a (mostly) white background, it's hard to see.

5. And if you leave the page (say, to check your email or calendar), the map is now replaced by yet another popup for their 4th of July closing (which is actually useful information, except... the 'closing' part is at the bottom in small text, below that giant photo of an American flag), covering up all the information you just went through all that trouble to find.

The underlying message here is one which, thankfully, I have maintained since whenever Flash® was engendered.
Don't use it!

NFriday wrote:Has anybody eaten here? There were some very good reviews under the comment section. Several people commented how reasonable the restaurant is. The menu is practically useless though. You cannot scroll through it slow enough to actually read it, and it lists no prices. rarely get to Naperville, and so I guess I will have to miss the restaurant. Thanks, Nancy

I have eaten there several times and the food is pretty good.

MOST restaurant websites are very mediocre. These are my pet peeves:

1) Menus that have not been updated for months or years.

2) No prices on the menu. I am tired of the big surprise when I sit down and find out that the restaurant is 2-3x more expensive than what I thought.

3) Websites that look like it was their kid's computer class project.

4) No menu posted because the menu "changes every day." Great, then how about a sample menu that gives us an idea of the type of food that you serve and the prices?

5) Misspellings. If English is a second language, hire someone to proofread. Maybe I am asking too much these days as the University of Arizona puts out a lot of brochures with spelling and grammar errors.

6) Lack of contact information and lack of a STREET address on the home page makes my life more difficult.

7) Pictures on the website that look much better than the food I am eventually served.

pudgym29 wrote: The underlying message here is one which, thankfully, I have maintained since whenever Flash® was engendered.
Don't use it!

Flash has its uses, even with restaurant websites - it's just that the manner in which it's being used is actively fighting against the customer. Fighting your customers is not a good way to attract business.

Maybe I am asking too much these days as the University of Arizona puts out a lot of brochures with spelling and grammar errors.

Dying laughing here. DYING. That's so UofA!

There are two problems with spell checkers. (1) You have to use them, and (2) you have to know how to spell in order to select the correct spelling.

In the early days of computing I had a modest collection (perhaps half a dozen items) of printed ads for computer programs. To qualify for the collection, the ad had to say the program included a spellchecker AND the ad had to have a spelling error.

teatpuller wrote:Any nominations for Best Restaurant Website?

This should be a template:
http://www.littleserow.com/