

Why are restaurant websites so bad? - jsavimbi
http://www.boston.com/ae/food/restaurants/articles/2011/03/02/when_bad_websites_happen_to_good_restaurants/?p1=News_links

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bluekeybox
> Chefs and restaurateurs are arbiters of taste offline. Their good judgment
> can’t simply fly out the window when they take to the Internet. So why do
> bad websites happen to good restaurants?

Or maybe, just maybe, that "good judgement" that chefs and restaurateurs
supposedly possess is only "good" when they apply to food and managing walk-in
businesses? You shouldn't expect a chef or a restaurateur, however good they
are, to be proficient in information aesthetics, and, in the same way, you
shouldn't expect a type designer to have good judgment about managing a
restaurant business.

Then the article goes on to say that "the website is a sign of the times. It
represents the trends of that moment." Well I got news for you -- it is
precisely that sort of thinking that got the restaurant websites into the
Flash-infested hole they are now. Yes, no one builds websites in Flash for
restaurants _today_ yet _everybody_ and their grandma did five years ago.
C'mon people, it shouldn't be that difficult to understand that one should
follow trends only insofar as they don't interfere with readability,
accessibility, user friendliness, and information clarity. Those last four
principles are timeless; they don't change -- if someone truly applied them
five years ago, the website would have survived and probably would have needed
only a minor cosmetic change to stay current.

> For designers and users, the emphasis now is on accessibility.

And why wasn't it five years ago, huh? Then, "we're a small restaurant so we
can’t really pay for it..." Oh please, stop the pathos -- why did all those
itty-bitty small restaurants pay significantly more for a Flash website five
years ago when a more accessible non-Flash version would have cost them way
less? Where's the critical thinking?

