

Why are restaurant web sites so bad?  - chrismealy
http://www.juliansanchez.com/2010/12/27/why-are-restaurant-web-sites-so-bad/

======
jasonlbaptiste
I think there are a few things here that cause this:

a) You're going against the worst kind of incumbent- the 15 year old nephew or
kid next door. He's cheaper, good enough, and "trusted". He is competition
that exists a million times over.

b) Even if your system is better, they just can't be bothered to even get a
good demo. You definitely need to build something so usable and good it's
frightening, but good luck getting the full demo.

c) The guys that do have the ability to get in with a demo (GoDaddy, yellow
pages,etc.) have no clue how to sell something good. What they usually sell is
usually crappy, so now you have a fearful restaurant owner.

d) To crack this market it's a "heavy startup". It requires lots of capital,
it requires sales, and it requires marketing. That's something guys like us
don't like to often venture into. It's the same reason GroupOn requires lots
of capital and other business like ReachLocal have feet on the street.

e) Churn is miserable. If you're on a monthly fee or provide additional
services, good luck keeping the customer. ReachLocal has something like 80%
churn,not retention, fucking churn.

Here's how I'd go about this for months 1-9. Crack the nut of an easy to use
system (point b) and find distribution channels that already exist (point c)
such as local newspapers, print shops, and others with a foot into the local
market. You'd also need to have a system of people to crank out onboarding in
a very cost efficient and systematic manner.

~~~
Retric
The other problem is going beyond, "hours of operation/location" + "menu" +
"phone number" takes integration with on site software. So now your competing
with all those Point Of Sale systems.

IMO, there is a huge opportunity for a unified website + POS + Back end
software company. But, to step beyond what's out there would take a huge
investment.

~~~
genieyclo
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

I help run a family restaurant with tight margins to deal with. With really
small capital to budget, my father and uncle decided a POS system was not
worth the money and commissioned me to build a usable system since I was the
"tech guy" of the family.

I hacked something up using kiosk mode browser running off of locally-hosted
PHP scripts saving to a MySQL database that backsup online nightly to Google
Docs. It's an old computer and hacky system, but it works because of the
ability to review data at night at home in the office via GDocs with pretty
stats and keeps the family happy.

I asked previously here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1431181> on HN,
but got no response.

I'd devote more time to this and get a better MVP out the door except for
extreme time commitments to said restaurant on the floor and in the back, and
due to school commitments.

Like Retric said, you could make a killing with a web presence+POS on the
floor+cloud saving features if you built a startup that showed __how __you
could save time and money for restaurants and make things easier, while not
charging for an arm and a leg. The market is filled with Geocities-era looking
sites from spammish vendors all with their unique-as-a-snowflake proprietary
file and data formats.

~~~
thangalin
Thought about releasing it?

I help run a local dance and have been looking for a simple, small POS setup
to help tally people (students, adults, seniors, and association members)
through the door. Right now we put tick marks in a log book.

I was thinking about developing a jQuery / PHP / PostgreSQL system with
nightly updates to Google Docs. Something that would run on a 5-year old
laptop.

------
zacstewart
After delivering pizza for a restaurant for two years, I finally convinced the
owner that his free, Frontpage-generated site wasn't good enough, and got him
to pay me to do a redesign. I learned a few things along the way.

1\. Restaurants have tiny margins. 7% profit is doing well, and dishing out
$1k or more for what they perceive to be a Yellow Pages ad is unthinkable for
a brick and mortar store.

2\. Restaurant people are techno-iliterates (in general). I set up a Google
Apps account so the managers could communicate with branded email, share
documents, schedules, etc, and had to give more than a couple training
sessions on these basic tools.

3\. They don't consider it something to be 'involved' with. I've tried to
press the point of building a presence through social networks, etc, but they
can't wrap their heads around it. To them, you should pay someone (as little
as possible) for it and it does it's job.

4\. They explicitly ask for the faux pas. Owner asked me to take down the
"outdated announcement" that we'll be having an event, since it was from last
month. This is on the blog portion of the site. Owner asked me to upload the
rest of the photos from an event (at least a hundred), even though the entire
album is on Facebook, even though I explained no one in the world is going to
care enough to flip through hundreds of jell-o wrestling photos on the news
page of some restaurant's website. Owner asked for a photo background versus
the subtle textured one I had designed the site with.

In the end, trying to teach them what emails is, arguing over design elements
and explaining how people will use the site isn't worth it because they are
going to be more work and less money than just about any other business owner.
Slap something together and collect your $500.

------
bdclimber14
Because restaurant owners are barely figuring out what email is.

How often do you go to restaurant websites vs. actual restaurants (not
including Yelp or Google maps)? Truth is, they just don't matter. The cost of
creating a website, even a $500 design over a CMS doesn't justify the cost.
Also, a small business restaurant owner won't know how to operate a CMS. They
just figured out email, remember? Worse, is that websites turn from beautiful
assets to liabilities.

The nephew of some restaurant owner finally convinces him or her that the
restaurant needs a website. The kid builds it for $100, everything is great.
Until the business owner needs to change store hours.

"What's that password that kid gave me again? What do I do with that password?
He mentioned logging in somewhere... Now that kid has a job at Google or is
doing a startup and doesn't have the time to mess with $10/hr type of work
anymore. Crap, now all my patrons are expecting me to be closing later and I
am turning them down. What a huge pain, I have to go find a new web designer."

The solution needs to be the anti-CMS. Something that's not as simple as
email, but as FAMILIAR ... Email is simple, but it was a huge learning curve
for that small business owner. And learning something else just as _simple_
will be a huge pain.

~~~
jdminhbg
"The cost of creating a website, even a $500 design over a CMS doesn't justify
the cost."

The question I guess is why restaurant owners spend money having flash
monstrosities built when most users -- especially those on mobile devices,
which is a big use-case for restaurant websites -- would rather see plain-jane
HTML with an address, phone number, and menu.

"The nephew of some restaurant owner finally convinces him or her that the
restaurant needs a website."

I suspect this is closer to the truth. The restaurant owner demographic
probably runs in the same circles as the dilettante designer demographic, so
the site is built by a wait(er|ress) with a copy of Flash CS.

~~~
zacstewart
So true. I designed a site for a restaurant while working there as a delivery
driver. The site, sucks, and I'm aware of that, but for the hassle of
physically meeting with the owner to get the specific on an update about a
Christmas party update or the unwillingness to pay something worth 10 hours of
work per month I'm not really going to try to improve it.

I have a job at a web agency now and doing anything better than what's there
simply wouldn't make since.

------
edanm
Interestingly, here in Israel, there's a standard layout for restaurant
websites that is almost always used, and it's pretty good.

I'm not 100% clear on the history, but afaik, a website called Rest.co.il (a
restaurant directory), offers restaurants a service for creating a website for
them. I'm guessing that initially, most restaurants that didn't have a website
just created one through Rest. Nowadays, 80% of restaurant websites I visit
are Rest-operated sites, with a very decent standard layout, including quick-
info for getting their number, quick info on average prices of meals, maps,
and detailed menus.

More and more restaurants are creating "unique" websites nowadays, but I think
because the level was so high initially, they're doing a pretty good job of
it. Pretty funny considering for other things in Israel, there is _much less_
web-awareness than in the States.

If you want examples (sorry, they're in Hebrew, but you can see they look the
same). Bottom-left is the quick-info, including information on accessibility
for people with disabilities, whether the food is Kosher, hours that they're
open, etc.:

<http://www.rest.co.il/sites/Default.asp?txtRestID=1796>

<http://www.rest.co.il/sites/Default.asp?txtRestID=7775>

~~~
Semiapies
_"sorry, they're in Hebrew"_

Eh, that's what Google Translate is for.

That looks like a perfectly good standard template, both visually and in
hitting the points of what customers want to know - menus (with prices!),
hours, links to directions, some sense of what the place looks like, etc.

 _"because the level was so high initially, they're doing a pretty good job of
it"_

Very cool. There's something to be said for a genuinely _good_ basic approach.

------
patio11
Restaurants aren't unique offenders. Most physically extant businesses which
can't transact online suck. Try your dentist's.

~~~
redwood
No matter how unique a restaurant's website is, it cannot satisfy a customer
to that restaurant: only the food can. Thus there is little impetus for the
restaurant to try to create a good experience online.

~~~
throw_away
I was going to write pretty much the same comment on the tazo tea landing page
discussion, but online sales aren't the end-all-be-all justification for
having a good, easy to use web site. Very often, if I'm considering going to a
restaurant or coffeeshop that I've never been to, I'll look for a website to
figure out the hours, location and menu & perhaps to find out more about the
place. A website that is difficult to navigate or looks ugly won't hurt them,
exactly, as I wasn't a customer, but a good site might compel me to visit or
to try their product next time I have a chance. I've also chosen not to try
out places and products before, just because I couldn't figure out an easy way
of knowing whether they were open or because I couldn't figure out more info
about the product.

Furthermore, there are places that I go to regularly whose easy access to info
regarding hours and menu causes me to go there more often. Here is one from a
place I like: <http://eathomegrown.com/> Could be better (uses flash), but the
info I want is there. And they have a blog and social media presence. All this
has resulted in more than a few conversions into sandwich purchases from me,
personally.

------
dasil003
One reason for menus in PDF is because the menus may change frequently, and a
PDF is easy to create from their actual print menus. It doesn't seem like a
big deal to update both an InDesign layout and a website, but if different
people do those two things, then it's quite likely a mistake will be made, so
it's smart just to use the already proofed version.

~~~
ronnier
I also deal with this while keeping my resume updated and tweaked. I have an
HTML, PDF, and MS Word format. I use a print CSS sytle sheet on my homepage
(<http://ronnie.me>) so that I can print it to PDF for the PDF version and
manually create the Word version. Very tedious.

~~~
jat850
That's really neat. Is the CSS file readily available (for others to use), or
something you'd prefer not to give out?

(I realize I could probably crawl through the source on your page and just
take it, but that seems rude without asking.)

~~~
ronnier
It's as simple as creating a style sheet, targeting items you don't want to
print, or create a class such as .noprint, and hide the items with { display:
none; }

You'd want to put that CSS in a separate file and include it like this:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="print.css" />

The important bit is the media="print". Look at mine all you like, nice of you
to consider asking :)

------
chunkyslink
We've been quite successful at cracking the UK market and we run the sites for
a few of the UK's biggest chains down to some smaller brasserie style
companies.

I'd like to present some work which I think is good for a change (there are a
lot of bad examples on here)

So here we go

<http://giraffe.net>

<http://www.chezgerard.co.uk>

<http://www.brasseriegerard.co.uk>

Some of our older ones

<http://www.strada.co.uk>

<http://www.caferouge.co.uk>

<http://www.bellaitalia.co.uk>

The most visited pages on our busiest sites are

1\. Offers and vouchers

2\. Locations

3\. Menus

so it is really important to do those well.

Also we've recently launched a product that allows anyone with a website the
ability to have a content managed mobile site set up and working in no time.

The product is called <http://www.pocketdiner.co.uk>

Any feedback or comments are welcome

~~~
iheartmemcache
Well, I think we're all thinking it- how'd you go about acquiring your
customers (as that's a notoriously hard market to crack)?

Also, your pricing for "Chain" @PocketDiner seems wayyy too low. Even £49/mo
for "Multi" is probably priced too low. The overhead per store per hour is
probably more than that.

------
jarin
Having worked with restaurants before (and having a dad who owns a
restaurant), I have come to the conclusion that it's just because most
restaurant owners a) just want something that works and is cheap, and b) do
not fully understand how web design can help or hurt their businesses.

Bad web designers tend to target restaurants (and medical practitioners)
because they have a much easier time selling bad design to them.

------
bradleyland
Perhaps there is no business case for having a good, CSS/HTML based website
when your business is turning over tables?

That's a serious question. Has anyone here been involved with a restaurant or
food-service related start-up that isn't an aggregator or social networking
play? Maybe someone can shed some light on the roadblock?

~~~
chunkyslink
See my comments above <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2044753>

Restaurants need to see results

1\. Grow their email database and they have contacts they can market to. 2\.
Engage the customers with the site. Keep them coming back. 2 for 1 vouchers
anyone? 3\. Provide the basic information like where, when and how much. Make
this accessible across devices.

It doesnt matter how good your site is, if your food sucks you loose.

------
sdizdar
I spent some time doing customer development for my <http://wall.si> project,
so I have some experience with this.

The top four concerns for restaurants are: personnel, personnel, personnel,
and personnel.

Cool looking web site is really peripheral for many restaurants. Mobile
support .. What?

------
dasht
Because a lot of web site design services sold to restaurants are sold by
hucksters.

p.s.: not all hucksters know that that's what they are. Heck, you or I might
be one, without meaning to be so. Of course, plenty enough do mean to be so
and do awright for themselves that way.

~~~
sudont
Touché. Now, just to figure out how to sell our honest and genuine services to
them.

Cold calling? Anybody with similar experience? I’m genuinely interested.

~~~
netcan
I think you underestimate the powers that have given rise to the current state
of affairs. Ecosystems of sellers usually develop around the characteristics
of buyers. Restauranteurs are (as a general rule) terrible buyers and terrible
clients.

You might look at a site and think "that'll take x hours to do," but you need
to factor in the time that it takes to get the client there. In my experience,
that's several times x. Just making the sale could be several times x.

You need to realize you are starting from scratch and that from where you
stand, it's hard to know where scratch is. You will need to convince them why
flash is bad (even though everyone they ask thinks it looks great). This is
just one example. They will not be able to evaluate the site from the
perspective of the user, that kind of thinking takes practice.

Then crisis strikes when your offer which includes some little mini-app to do
that thing they want with the menus (already done) and a custom design (hired
a mid range designer) costs more than the other offer which is largely auto-
generated.

The reasons are similar for large companies having bad software, they are bad
buyers.

~~~
sudont
I see! This must stem from the culture of cheapness that surrounds a lot of
restaurants; supposedly the industry is cut-throat.

This just means that the problem needs to be attacked on a different front:
marketing. Which is where the hucksters come in...

------
lowglow
<http://www.onebigmenu.com>

I'm working on this site right now, and I understand your concerns because I
feel them myself. I'm hoping I can bridge the gap between dining and diner. :)

(Please excuse the design, since I'm the only developer :P)

~~~
lowglow
One last thing, If any developers want to join forces, that would be cool too
:)

~~~
earino
This interests me. What's the plaform?

~~~
lowglow
Simple lamp stack using codeigniter. Nothing fancy. Runs on MediaTemple's VE
Server.

~~~
jdavid
why didn't you choose kohana? <http://kohanaframework.org/>

it's based off of codeigniter, but it's fully OO. are you using some sort of
ORM like active record? if you are, you should look at the tables and see how
many joins the ORM layer is doing so you know how much work it's going to be
to scale.

~~~
lowglow
Hey Justin, thanks for the tip. I'll check it out. I'm not using Active Record
currently, but scaling up is something I worry about and just won't understand
until I have the problem first hand. Maybe we can chat about this sometime.

------
callmeed
I'm working on something at the moment. Just hours + menu + some optional
social integration.

Based the research/feedback I've done, decision makers have near-zero time to
learn or use a cms (hence why menus are always in PDF) and near-zero budget.

So what I'm going for is a super-simple system much like about.me/flavors.me
... something around $5 to $9/month or possibly even free and use it as a
gateway to other services (also working on a diy groupon clone and staff
scheduler for restaurants).

~~~
lowglow
Hey, I'm working on something like this too :)

------
trafficlight
All I want to see are the menu and the hours of operation.

~~~
Volscio
Word. I want the hours, location, phone number, and menu. All in a format I
can copy & paste into my email to convince my friends to go.

I rarely get any of that at a restaurant's web site.

No wonder that it's easier to google/yelp it and use their listings.

~~~
cubicle67
See, that's where it gets hard. Menus, and especially prices, change. People
get upset if they're charged differently to what they saw on the website, and
keeping the two in sync requires a conscious effort on behalf of the
restaurant that it's not likely going to receive.

There's two way around this problem (keeping the website up to date) that I
can see: integrate with existing POS system (expensive and hard) or offer a
service to update the site for them.

There's an idea for someone - buy yourself a fax machine (yes, really), and
offer a service whereby clients fax you a copy of their menu when it changes
and you update their website.

~~~
lowglow
Great suggestions. I'll actually talk about implementing this with some
people.

------
augustiner
I once built an online dish ordering website with interface similar to digg
and reddit. It showed dishes in your area sorted by the number of times they
have been ordered online. I still host a short video demo of the site:
<http://video.eatlista.pl/> (it's in Polish language, but still, could be
inspiring for someone).

Anyway I ditched the idea after talking to restaurant owners, they were mostly
older people, having hard time grasping the concept of the site (and even the
Internet itself) and I didn't enjoy the idea of educating them.

------
julian37
Here be more lamenting over awful restaurant web sites:

[http://www.portlandfoodanddrink.com/2010/03/what-is-it-
about...](http://www.portlandfoodanddrink.com/2010/03/what-is-it-about-
restaurant-websites/)

[http://www.badlanguage.net/why-are-restaurant-websites-so-
aw...](http://www.badlanguage.net/why-are-restaurant-websites-so-awful)

[http://blogs.houstonpress.com/eating/2010/09/10_reasons_your...](http://blogs.houstonpress.com/eating/2010/09/10_reasons_your_restaurant_web.php)

------
albemuth
I've been thinking about developing a custom cms/site builder of sorts, pitch
it to one restaurant and make both the customer and owner experience really
smooth. On one side, I would have a restaurant directory with all the info,
recommendations and what not, but the owner would get a site with no 3rd party
branding and their own domain, charge a monthly fee and get free dinners on a
bunch of places.

But then I imagine explaining my idea to other people and having them ask "so,
uhhm, like geocities?"

~~~
klbarry
I did local SEO work for a while - I assure you, assuming small business
owners have knowledge of even geocities is greatly overestimating their
technical knowledge.

------
angdis
Obviously, because the sites are based on decisions made by one person who is
not a web design expert. But that's okay, there are ways around that problem
for the restaurant-goer: yelp.com provides a useable interface, socially
vetted, and normalized so that places can be compared. I hardly bother with
the restaurant's site anymore, they're all on yelp.

~~~
jshen
true, but it makes it hard for those of us working on local search sites to
crawl their sites too :/

~~~
angdis
Oh, you mean "web-crawl".

With restaurants, its much better to "physically crawl", some of the really
good hole-in-the-wall places, I think, would be terrible at self-
categorization.

I think its much better for restaurants to list themselves with a service like
"yelp" or "open-table" or even the local city paper than to try to make
anything more than a bare-bones website.

~~~
jshen
you should always own your online presence.

------
davej
I know first-hand what kind of budgets most small/medium-sized restaurants
have for websites and online marketing.

Its much better to put resources and money into a profile/photos/menu on a
site like <http://www.grabmytable.com/> than doing a half-arsed 'proper'
website.

------
T_S_
Most web sites are bad. That's why.

Eventually things like Google Places, Yelp, etc. will handle 100% of their UX.

------
rwhitman
Luddite client meets designer who has made their living wowing luddite clients
with style over substance.

Also note that movie websites have the same problem. For mostly the same
reasons, though the organizations involved and cash transactions are much
larger...

------
prawn
Anyone tried offering a deal to a restaurant owner whereby you get a tab
(e.g., shout friends a $500 dinner) to build a site and then a lunch/dinner
per month in exchange for maintenance of menus, etc?

~~~
japherwocky
I built/host a site for a local brewery, and I bill them $X/mo for hosting and
small tweaks. We've definitely bartered some of those invoices away. :)

~~~
prawn
I just wondered about sending a letter to a swag of restaurants offering it as
a service. Say that the first 3-5 to respond can take up the offer but
potentially take on more. Quick site build, get interns to do the maintenance,
and then eat out at a different restaurant each night of the month. Hmmm.

------
ianlotinsky
SandwichBoard does restaurant web sites (<http://www.sandwichboard.com/>).

We've found that the owners and managers who "don't get it" are the ones who
think that the web site experience should be the same as the restaurant
experience: background music, a menu that looks identical to the physical one,
and a picture of every dish.

The ones who do "get it" entrust their web site to designers and usability
experts who make it their goal to turn web site visitors into patrons.

------
dedward
Many - because they don't need a better online presence to get more business.
Their tables are full - the only way to squeeze more profits is to charge
more, possibly changing clientele, or act more efficiently, or both.

A cool website for reservations/tables/photos etc COULD be part of a themed
restaurant or restaurant chain to differentiate them in the market... but for
the most part, the food speaks for itself.

------
blhack
Huh. I just realized that I have a strange association between restaurants and
their websites.

My expectation of quality is inversely correlated to the quality of their
website. When I see a restaurant website that is "good", it makes me thing
"chain. corporate. bland. boring."

~~~
ronnier
Am I the only person who doesn't mind chain and corporate eateries?

~~~
blhack
No, and neither do I. One of my favorite chain places that I eat at all the
time is Jimmy Johns. They have _awesome_ sandwiches. I always joke with my
friends that, if they like subway, they should definitely not go to JJ because
they're never going to be able to eat it ever again.

What I was getting at is that a crappy website can _sometimes_ be a good
indicator for places like the little deli that I go to sometimes, or my
neighborhood bar. If the little deli (called cheese and stuff, for you
Phoenicians: <http://www.cheesenstuffdeli.com/>) had a "good" website, it
would seem out of character to me.

------
3pt14159
The reason these websites are bad is because the owners have never heard of
conversions, marketing iteration, "the funnel", so what they end up with is a
shitty site that they forget about.

------
known
No need for _sites_. Use twitter.

~~~
angdis
Indeed. I went to a fabulous tiny restaurant in philly recently. While
chatting with owner, she mentioned that a reservation had just canceled and
then proceeded to tweet that there was an open table. Within literally 2
minutes, she filled the reservation.

Who says restaurant owners don't get computers!

The saavy ones know their core competency and don't try to get fancy. The
restaurant I mentioned has a super simple website done with inuit sitebuilder.
It does the job, but with places like this the most important thing is what
others say about the place and the clout the owner cultivates with their
customers.

