Comments on: Why are restaurant websites so awful?

By: Goro

Goro — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 05:16:50 +0000

Personally, I like Flash, but I agree that it has its time and place, and for restaurants, can easily lead to an unmaintainable, seo-killing disaster.
While this isn’t necessarily the answer to these problems, I thought you’d find my new web application to be an interesting solution (at least for smaller restaurants): http://www.LetsEat.at
It’s a simple CMS for restaurants that allows them to create an SEO-friendly website just by filling in some text fields, a la Wordpress or Blogger. I was originally going to use it as a backend for local restaurant sites here in Portland, Oregon, but decided to just make it free and open it to the public. It’s currently beta testing, so may still be a little buggy.

By: Edwin Arneson

Edwin Arneson — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 06:57:01 +0000

I’m not a fan of Flash sites. I actually like the brief music associated with the top menu items on the Guy Savoy web site. The vertical text on the bottom menu wasn’t obvious, but in the end, the site was interesting enough to poke around on for a few minutes.

There’s a restaurant around here that has an ad in the paper and they say “go to our web site,” but they don’t list the URL. Unbelievably, if you happen to find their web site and look at the source code for the only page (it’s a Flash site), you won’t find the restaurant’s name. Hence, even though Google has indexed it, you can’t find the restaurant’s web site using the restaurant’s name!

By: Andrew Denny

Andrew Denny — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 11:13:09 +0000

Never mind restaurants; what about architects?

I’ve yet to find *any* decent website for an architectural website. They are all flash-based and almost all use animation, which is ironic for a discipline based around an art set in stone.

By: Marketing Snark » On Being Authentic

Marketing Snark » On Being Authentic — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:56:38 +0000

[...] Matthew Stibbe posted on the awfulness of restaurant websites. He’s talking about top-rated one-of-a-kind restaurants, not Joe’s Crab Shack, but I [...]

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:54:08 +0000

Ramsay was obviously well advised in terms of design, but any web designer worth their salt should have snapped up that Ramsey spelling like you say. He may actually have a case for passing off though because the people who have parked it are so obviously trying to cash in on his name by theming the parked page on food

By: richard

richard — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 01:08:33 +0000

Hi Matthew,
Spot on! The French Laundry site…jeez, you’d think they would know better. I cannot believe how many designers keep selling flash to their customers. Enough already!

One thing I’ve also noticed is how hard it can be to find a restaurant’s site because a lot of half-baked “tourist/hotel/sightseeing/city-life” type sites publish mini posts on these restaurants and they are often the ones that rise to the top in Google searches.

Check out these two:
http://laurokitchen.com
http://vindalho.com
These are run by my good friend David Machado a chef in Portland, Oregon - who you might be interested to know, trained in San Francisco.
cheers,
rp
I helped rescue the copy from near disaster.

By: Peter

Peter — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:45:39 +0000

Great pitch!

I must say, I nearly fell off my chair when I read about the food poisoning incident. I think I’ll stick to MacDonald’s.