10 ms·

The hell that is a restaurant website

292 points by telemachos 17y ago

Better link: http://venomousporridge.com/post/389785000/a-conversation-i-have-every-month-or-so

elblanco 17y ago
Oh if this isn't true. Due to valentine's day I ran into this about a dozen times before just going to the local "nice restaurant".
- prawn 17y ago
  An idea of mine is for calendar-specific events. e.g., for Valentine's Day, I often look to see which decent restaurants are running special events like degustations. For Melbourne Cup, I want to know who's doing booking-only and who's got a free for all. For NYE, people want to know if there's a specific cover charge or event when they're trying to pick a place to go. Right now, if you want to book a special event for Valentine's Day, you have to go from site to site, hoping restaurants have updated recently (fat chance), and then contact them to see if they have a booking. Would be so much simpler to pick the event, the locale and then see a list of options including whether they were already booked out. With a database of restaurant phone numbers, the polling of data could be automated. Robo-dial a restaurant at a less-than-busy time with "This is Service X. Are you doing anything special for Event Name? If the usual, press 1. If a special menu, press 2. If you never want us to pester you again, press 0." Then receive and transcribe the eventual descriptions. Could have an automated call handling capacity too. "Are you booked out for Event Name? Press 1 for no, or press 2 if you are booked out. Hit 0 to stop these messages."
telemachos 17y ago
Randomly selected favorites (restaurants, not websites) from my hometown: http://www.tablany.com/ http://www.tablany.com/ http://shakeshack.com/ http://shakeshack.com/ (Nope, I'm completely off-base here. Shake Shack has a lovely, flash-free, pdf-free mobile version. Apologies to Danny Meyer and company.) http://barstuzzichini.com/index.asp http://barstuzzichini.com/index.asp I should send them a snapshot of what their websites look like with ClickToFlash installed.
- lliiffee 17y ago
  In fairness, shakeshack has a wonderfully simple version that loads for me with noscript on.
  - telemachos 17y ago
    Maybe so, but with ClickToFlash, I get one giant Flash button. (This suggests that on an iPhone, you're toast if you surf there.) The nearby Standburger does much better, and their toasted marshmallow shake is the wife's favorite anyhow. http://www.standburger.com/ http://www.standburger.com/ @Mikeryan, you are completely right. I was going there as you replied. I edited my post above to note that. Weirdly, Tabla (same owner) does not have an alternative website for mobile.
    - mikeryan 17y ago
      No shakeshack.com has a very nice iphone based site if you go there on the iphone. Kudos to them for handling this well.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
rubyrescue 17y ago
Amen. This is why we're building BuenaCarta.com - example page: http://www.buenacarta.com/restaurantes/buenos-aires/palermo-soho/la-paila http://www.buenacarta.com/restaurantes/buenos-aires/palermo-... (very early alpha)... We're starting with South America but we're planning on releasing a white label version of the product for other markets (and not just restaurants). Our focus is right now on getting reviews 'right', before we start building content, because we still believe there's not a truly good restaurant/bar/store review site whose reviews aren't ranked using hidden magic, astroturfed, or just really, really bland. We've spent a lot of time on the "Open Hours" feature - we want people to view a page and see "Open NOW", "Open Later Today", "Closed Today", etc. so that they're sure it's really open, or it will be when they take a cab across town, or so its really clear they're closed mondays and you don't go all the way there only to find that out. However, we also want to be able to search the data ourselves, and we want it to be localized into two or three languages. So we can't just store the open hours as a string, we need to render the open hours as text but it needs to be stored as data. Generating the English/Spanish/Portuguese from the data is a lot of fun.
- nazgulnarsil 17y ago
  god i wish there was a US site that aggregated hours info.
  - natrius 17y ago
    Yelp does. If you expand the search options, you can limit your search to places that are open now, or at any given time.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - prawn 17y ago
    I've always wondered about an iPhone or web-app for a given location that just showed what was open right then and how soon they closed. Quite often I'm in an area at 10pm with friends wondering what our dining options are. Would obviously need the cooperation of the restaurants themselves though.
antidaily 17y ago
yelp app.
- whopa 17y ago
  In my experience, Yelp's open hours data is inaccurate often enough to be entirely untrustworthy.
  - ecuzzillo 17y ago
    Thank you for telling me that.
- jmtame 17y ago
  Loopt added restaurants (store hours too) and they aggregate dozens of disparate review sites like Yelp, CitySearch, Zagat, Daily Candy, Thrillist, and Voyage. They will announce more soon.
rodyancy 17y ago
I've ran into this problem so many times I've developed a workaround using various applications. Google maps on the iphone gets me the phone number. If I have to see a menu, UrbanSpoon or Yelp works sometimes. I don't even bother with mobile browsers.
waterlesscloud 17y ago
My theory on this is that it's two things- One, every restaurant wants their site to look like every other restaurant site. Which makes a certain kind of sense, even if it's the wrong approach. Two, web developers push this kind of website because it would be hard to justify charging a decent wage for the basic sites that restaurants really need. So they make it all fancy.
- InclinedPlane 17y ago
  I think it's more that many restaurant owners are unsophisticated when it comes to the web, and it's easier for designers to sell a flash-based site because it looks fancier in a demo than a plain html site. It's comparatively more difficult to pitch usability.
  - petercooper 17y ago
    and it's easier for designers to sell a flash-based site because it looks fancier in a demo than a plain html site. I agree. The design of the menus at these sorts of places gives it away. I'd rather have some jumbled, but useful, menu like they have at Jerry's or the typical diner than the over-designed moody nonsense they have at these modern "fancy" places.
  - Dav3xor 17y ago
    A friend of mine used to work for a local television station. When a local business wanted to run an ad, they had an internal form that got filled out that had a field that said -- "Customer has expressed an interest in having his (pet, small child)in the spot." Bad taste is universal.
    - Hexstream 17y ago
      Related: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell
  - bodhi 17y ago
    The first comment made an excellent point I believe: > Owners never visit their own websites after the initial presentation by the web designers because they don't need to. However, the design firm pitches to the owner, not to the customers. And thus the website is designed to please them, rather than actually being useful for potential customers.
callmeed 17y ago
We're actually working on a rest. site solution now precisely because Flash sites, PDF menus, and impossible-to-use-on-mobile drives us crazy. I will probably apply to YC with it but we plan to release in May regardless. There's a big restaurant trade show then and we're planning to exhibit.
mprime 17y ago
Common sense would dictate that Flash/PDF's/.doc's/JavaScript is/are only necessary in a small number of cases, when there is no other way to provide that content. When you use it, you're making an assumption about what the user is willing and able to process on their end. If you do that enough, it becomes just as annoying as someone distributing a C file for everyone to use that relies on windows.h What's worse still is that it took the iPhone not supporting Flash for everyone to realize that Flash actually isn't needed for most things.
- pyre 17y ago
  > What's worse still is that it took the iPhone not supporting Flash for everyone to realize that Flash actually isn't needed for most things. In the case of restaurants, it's even worse though. These are the kinds of businesses that people will want to look up information about while they are out (and presumably away from a desktop/laptop with internet access). So making it inaccessible to the kind of people that would want to look for your hours before deciding to become your customer is a detriment to you bottom-line. Note that it mostly has to do with iPhone/Android making web browsing on a phone a less painful experience. Phones had browsers before that didn't support Flash.
- _delirium 17y ago
  One explanation I've heard for the PDF menus is that they have to have PDF versions anyway for printing, so the least-effort solution is to just put the same PDFs online.
  - mprime 17y ago
    If they can't be bothered to run the PDF through a program to translate it to HTML, and then post a link to the PDF version, I don't want to do business with them. If their menu is so fancy that it can't be easily translated into HTML, they're missing the point entirely.
    - kscaldef 17y ago
      Well, good luck with that approach, I guess. Personally I care a lot more about the quality of the food, the quality of service, the cleanliness of the restaurant, the ambiance, the price, ...
telemachos 17y ago
I seem to have accidentally linked to the #disqus-thread version of the link. If anyone with mod powers (?) happens by and can fix it, thanks in advance.
dpcan 17y ago
I see what's happening here. He's taking a shot at Flash. Right? No, he's taking a shot at a terrible web designer. Wait, no again. It must be taking a shot at a restaurant owner who saw a moving website with flying cheeseburgers and thought it was really cool and demanded the same thing from the web development company he/she hired. So, "Website" that's totally ignoring me, I apologize for accusing you of being Flash, when in reality it's your advertising and marketing decision makers who are clueless.
sonnym 17y ago
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned allmenus.com - a bit menu-centric, but still lists the hours of most restaurants. It's a spin-off of campusfood.com, so it has online ordering capabilities built-in.
- dpritchett 17y ago
  See also Memphis-area startup http://www.MarksMenus.com http://www.MarksMenus.com. This one came out of Startup Weekend in 2009. It does menus and per-dish reviews with user comments and reviews. I'm not affiliated but I did meet the founders at SUWMem.
pg 17y ago
http://fukisushi.com http://fukisushi.com
- eam 17y ago
  http://elfarolitoinc.com/ http://elfarolitoinc.com/
  - Semiapies 17y ago
    That's the most useful "under construction" page I've ever seen.
johnl 17y ago
Why don't you create an app that solves that particular problem and give it away free on the condition that you can dish up and split Google ads on the app. Create a site where they can automatically update their hours. Some simple loan calculators made good money referring people to mortgage companies a few years ago.
kaiserama 17y ago
I worked on this problem for about 6 months, I had built a simple hosted solution, for restaurants in this case, that the operator could build a mobile version of their site that was viewable on iPhone, Android, and Blackberry. The first few places I told the idea to loved it and so I thought it might take off. Unfortunately (fortunately?) for me I happened to talk to two restaurant operators who actually used social media and 'got it'. When I started doing more market research with other operators and restaurant marketers the basic reaction was simply this: operators are too busy to be bothered with frivolous things like websites, and for some even email addresses. They're just trying to get through the month, the week, the day without closing the place up (obviously a lot of turn over in the industry). My personal take is that the next generation of operators will likely be more receptive and will see the value in using different forms of media and accepting that people get their information in very different ways than even 5 years ago. I think there are other ways to make money in the restaurant industry, if I was someone looking to do something in this industry I'd start making some connections with the US Foods and the Syscos of the world, alone you'll be lucky to even get face time with an operator, let alone convince them to use your product. If anyone is interested one of the restaurants that used the service was here http://www.edinagrill.com http://www.edinagrill.com, access from your iphone/android/blackberry and you'll see a mobile version vs normal browser.
- autarch 17y ago
  I'm not sure you "got" it, based on the horrific flash nav menu, and the ridiculously small window all the info is displayed in (I have more than 300 or so vertical pixels!).
  - kaiserama 17y ago
    That's part of their full site. If you're accessing from an iPhone, Android, or Blackberry and haven't disabled Javascript you should see a mobile friendly version. Other devices may display it differently.
- stevenwei 17y ago
  How long ago was this? I've seen a couple of companies that are building generalized template solutions for restaurant owners to export websites, iPhone apps, etc.
jasonlbaptiste 17y ago
grr, i cant find the company/post, but a long while back sergey brin invested in a startup that basically listed information for a business' operating hours.
autarch 17y ago
Here's an exception - http://evergreen-chinese.com http://evergreen-chinese.com All HTML and CSS, hours, phone #, and address all on the front page. Menu is in HTML and kept up to date.
- sebastianavina 17y ago
  let me guess... one of your projects.
  - autarch 17y ago
    Not exactly. I'm friends with the owners, and when they wanted a website, I handed them off to a designer friend of mine who I know does good work. I do host the website and keep the menu up to date for them, though.
metamemetics 17y ago
I'm in the midst of designing a restaurant website right now. They initially asked for Flash, but I showed them a jQuery\html\css design instead. They really liked it and it wasn't a problem. Also using Django as a CMS for mailing list and menu items.
ThomPete 17y ago
This seems like a pseudo problem, no? Don't most people use exactly everything else than the restaurants website and instead yelp.com, allmenus.com.
icefox 17y ago
+1 for movie theaters also. I have one right down the street that I have didn't go to for years because it was just a big flash box that I could never use to find out what they were playing. I want to give them money, but I don't think they get that.
radley 17y ago
dev: I just made an incredible site for you - it's totally HTML5. rest: I can't see the video. dev: you have to use Google Chrome. rest: I Googled Chrome. It took me to a picture of YouTube. Is my video on YouTube? dev: no - that's a picture of a browser with YouTube in it. You have to download it. The browser I mean. rest: I already have a browser. It's called Firefox Explorer or something. dev: No you have to use this one. It's the best. rest: but it says beta. Doesn't that mean it's not done? dev: it's fine. It's better than your browser. rest: How is it better than my browser? My customers don't even have that browser. dev: because it's a standard. So everyone has to use it. rest: I want my Flash site back. dev: No! Flash is bad! It's not open source. rest: I'd rather be open for business... la la la
- jauco 17y ago
  Me: oh no. Not another annoying video. I just want to know if they have a table for two at 8pm tonight!
- ZeroGravitas 17y ago
  dev: I just made an incredible site for you - it's totally HTML5. rest: I can't see the video. dev: There is no video. You're a bloody restaurant, not Lady Gaga.
  - radley 17y ago
    rest: Can I at least use a nice font? dev: NO FONT FOR YOU!
- radley 17y ago
  customer: I'll have the lamb and wild rice please. waiter: good choice. [minutes later] Here's your meal. Enjoy =) customer: WTF? What is this? Is this… is it... cat food? waiter: it's what you ordered. See on the foil in big letters it spells out "Whiskas Lamb and Wild Rice." Enjoy =) customer: I can't eat that! It's gross! waiter: oh please. According to our pushy web developer, flashy presentation is overrated. It's food, it's edible. Enjoy =) customer: but it will taste terrible! waiter: Have you seen Jakob Nielsen's website? Taste is irrelevant. customer: but this isn't even people food. waiter: you're not Lady Gaga. [apologies for flogging / not letting this go... I couldn't resist the opportunity to mix Whiskas and Nielsen together in the same bad joke... I need help.]
Groxx 17y ago
Restaurant websites are indeed a special kind of hell. They're nearly universally Flash'd up and annoying. My solution for restaurant-website-woes, especially for simple things like hours: phone. Their automated answerer will probably tell you before you could navigate their site. Especially with Goog 411, I rarely use my computer for business phone numbers any more.
payjo 17y ago
Am I missing something here or do people not just go to yelp? They have hours for most businesses. Or is this post more aimed at new ventures and the importance of having hours on the site?
thetable 17y ago
I find it sad that many restaurants are so bad at SEO, or maybe they just can't compete with Yelp and their spammier friends. Often, it's nearly impossible to find the one authoritative website on a restaurant, bar, or store - the one owned by that business. Instead, search engine result pages tend to be dominated by crappy Yellow pages entries that may or may not include the correct phone number of the place, but never photos, the menu or the hours.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
timdorr 17y ago
It's funny to read this because we just did this for a client: http://www.bluefinatlanta.com/ http://www.bluefinatlanta.com/ Hours on the front page, menu in HTML, zero Flash. Not even that hard to do, realistically. Before, they didn't even show up in Google's results for "Atlanta sushi". Now they've actually got some content to index. I get that it's easy to market flashy sites, but it's also easy to market search engine optimization too.
tjic 17y ago
As I wrote yesterday in a different comment: People who submit stories: please submit the URL of the article, not the anchor-laden URL of the comments. This happens all the time, and it's annoying. Thank you.
roedog 17y ago
I appreciate the practical and intrinsic value of a good website, and how a restaurant owner may not appreciate the difference in work quality of web design consultants. What I wonder is why should they care? I think that the success of a restaurant depends far more on the food, service, and setting of the restaurant itself. Setting aside we discerning HN readers, very few people choose where to eat based on web design. I have a theory from observations of restaurants in my city. The restaurants with neon "OPEN" signs in front tend to be more empty than the ones without the OPEN sign. This is across all price points and styles. My thinking is that they are not filling tables, so think they need to let people know they are open and to come eat there. If people are not eating at your restaurant, will making a good quality website with accurate hours help you?
scarlson 17y ago
Or, you could have just phoned the place and asked whoever picked up the receiver. While I agree that restaurants could do well to have iPhone accessible store hours, I don't think it's totally unrealistic to phone in and politely ask the maître d’.
eldenbishop 17y ago
Sometimes it is just laughable...I went to a website on my phone to look up the menu. I got a "flash required" message. I was at home so I dug out my laptop and went to the site. The "Flash" application was a static image with the hours and phone number printed on it.

292 points by telemachos 17y ago

Better link: http://venomousporridge.com/post/389785000/a-conversation-i-have-every-month-or-so

Oh if this isn't true. Due to valentine's day I ran into this about a dozen times before just going to the local "nice restaurant".

prawn 17y ago
An idea of mine is for calendar-specific events. e.g., for Valentine's Day, I often look to see which decent restaurants are running special events like degustations. For Melbourne Cup, I want to know who's doing booking-only and who's got a free for all. For NYE, people want to know if there's a specific cover charge or event when they're trying to pick a place to go. Right now, if you want to book a special event for Valentine's Day, you have to go from site to site, hoping restaurants have updated recently (fat chance), and then contact them to see if they have a booking. Would be so much simpler to pick the event, the locale and then see a list of options including whether they were already booked out. With a database of restaurant phone numbers, the polling of data could be automated. Robo-dial a restaurant at a less-than-busy time with "This is Service X. Are you doing anything special for Event Name? If the usual, press 1. If a special menu, press 2. If you never want us to pester you again, press 0." Then receive and transcribe the eventual descriptions. Could have an automated call handling capacity too. "Are you booked out for Event Name? Press 1 for no, or press 2 if you are booked out. Hit 0 to stop these messages."

telemachos 17y ago

Randomly selected favorites (restaurants, not websites) from my hometown: http://www.tablany.com/ http://www.tablany.com/ http://shakeshack.com/ http://shakeshack.com/ (Nope, I'm completely off-base here. Shake Shack has a lovely, flash-free, pdf-free mobile version. Apologies to Danny Meyer and company.) http://barstuzzichini.com/index.asp http://barstuzzichini.com/index.asp I should send them a snapshot of what their websites look like with ClickToFlash installed.

lliiffee 17y ago
In fairness, shakeshack has a wonderfully simple version that loads for me with noscript on.
- telemachos 17y ago
  Maybe so, but with ClickToFlash, I get one giant Flash button. (This suggests that on an iPhone, you're toast if you surf there.) The nearby Standburger does much better, and their toasted marshmallow shake is the wife's favorite anyhow. http://www.standburger.com/ http://www.standburger.com/ @Mikeryan, you are completely right. I was going there as you replied. I edited my post above to note that. Weirdly, Tabla (same owner) does not have an alternative website for mobile.
  - mikeryan 17y ago
    No shakeshack.com has a very nice iphone based site if you go there on the iphone. Kudos to them for handling this well.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]

rubyrescue 17y ago

Amen. This is why we're building BuenaCarta.com - example page: http://www.buenacarta.com/restaurantes/buenos-aires/palermo-soho/la-paila http://www.buenacarta.com/restaurantes/buenos-aires/palermo-... (very early alpha)... We're starting with South America but we're planning on releasing a white label version of the product for other markets (and not just restaurants). Our focus is right now on getting reviews 'right', before we start building content, because we still believe there's not a truly good restaurant/bar/store review site whose reviews aren't ranked using hidden magic, astroturfed, or just really, really bland. We've spent a lot of time on the "Open Hours" feature - we want people to view a page and see "Open NOW", "Open Later Today", "Closed Today", etc. so that they're sure it's really open, or it will be when they take a cab across town, or so its really clear they're closed mondays and you don't go all the way there only to find that out. However, we also want to be able to search the data ourselves, and we want it to be localized into two or three languages. So we can't just store the open hours as a string, we need to render the open hours as text but it needs to be stored as data. Generating the English/Spanish/Portuguese from the data is a lot of fun.

nazgulnarsil 17y ago
god i wish there was a US site that aggregated hours info.
- natrius 17y ago
  Yelp does. If you expand the search options, you can limit your search to places that are open now, or at any given time.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- prawn 17y ago
  I've always wondered about an iPhone or web-app for a given location that just showed what was open right then and how soon they closed. Quite often I'm in an area at 10pm with friends wondering what our dining options are. Would obviously need the cooperation of the restaurants themselves though.

antidaily 17y ago

yelp app.

whopa 17y ago
In my experience, Yelp's open hours data is inaccurate often enough to be entirely untrustworthy.
- ecuzzillo 17y ago
  Thank you for telling me that.
jmtame 17y ago
Loopt added restaurants (store hours too) and they aggregate dozens of disparate review sites like Yelp, CitySearch, Zagat, Daily Candy, Thrillist, and Voyage. They will announce more soon.

rodyancy 17y ago

I've ran into this problem so many times I've developed a workaround using various applications. Google maps on the iphone gets me the phone number. If I have to see a menu, UrbanSpoon or Yelp works sometimes. I don't even bother with mobile browsers.

waterlesscloud 17y ago

My theory on this is that it's two things- One, every restaurant wants their site to look like every other restaurant site. Which makes a certain kind of sense, even if it's the wrong approach. Two, web developers push this kind of website because it would be hard to justify charging a decent wage for the basic sites that restaurants really need. So they make it all fancy.

InclinedPlane 17y ago
I think it's more that many restaurant owners are unsophisticated when it comes to the web, and it's easier for designers to sell a flash-based site because it looks fancier in a demo than a plain html site. It's comparatively more difficult to pitch usability.
- petercooper 17y ago
  and it's easier for designers to sell a flash-based site because it looks fancier in a demo than a plain html site. I agree. The design of the menus at these sorts of places gives it away. I'd rather have some jumbled, but useful, menu like they have at Jerry's or the typical diner than the over-designed moody nonsense they have at these modern "fancy" places.
- Dav3xor 17y ago
  A friend of mine used to work for a local television station. When a local business wanted to run an ad, they had an internal form that got filled out that had a field that said -- "Customer has expressed an interest in having his (pet, small child)in the spot." Bad taste is universal.
  - Hexstream 17y ago
    Related: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell
- bodhi 17y ago
  The first comment made an excellent point I believe: > Owners never visit their own websites after the initial presentation by the web designers because they don't need to. However, the design firm pitches to the owner, not to the customers. And thus the website is designed to please them, rather than actually being useful for potential customers.

callmeed 17y ago

We're actually working on a rest. site solution now precisely because Flash sites, PDF menus, and impossible-to-use-on-mobile drives us crazy. I will probably apply to YC with it but we plan to release in May regardless. There's a big restaurant trade show then and we're planning to exhibit.

mprime 17y ago

Common sense would dictate that Flash/PDF's/.doc's/JavaScript is/are only necessary in a small number of cases, when there is no other way to provide that content. When you use it, you're making an assumption about what the user is willing and able to process on their end. If you do that enough, it becomes just as annoying as someone distributing a C file for everyone to use that relies on windows.h What's worse still is that it took the iPhone not supporting Flash for everyone to realize that Flash actually isn't needed for most things.

pyre 17y ago
> What's worse still is that it took the iPhone not supporting Flash for everyone to realize that Flash actually isn't needed for most things. In the case of restaurants, it's even worse though. These are the kinds of businesses that people will want to look up information about while they are out (and presumably away from a desktop/laptop with internet access). So making it inaccessible to the kind of people that would want to look for your hours before deciding to become your customer is a detriment to you bottom-line. Note that it mostly has to do with iPhone/Android making web browsing on a phone a less painful experience. Phones had browsers before that didn't support Flash.
_delirium 17y ago
One explanation I've heard for the PDF menus is that they have to have PDF versions anyway for printing, so the least-effort solution is to just put the same PDFs online.
- mprime 17y ago
  If they can't be bothered to run the PDF through a program to translate it to HTML, and then post a link to the PDF version, I don't want to do business with them. If their menu is so fancy that it can't be easily translated into HTML, they're missing the point entirely.
  - kscaldef 17y ago
    Well, good luck with that approach, I guess. Personally I care a lot more about the quality of the food, the quality of service, the cleanliness of the restaurant, the ambiance, the price, ...

telemachos 17y ago

I seem to have accidentally linked to the #disqus-thread version of the link. If anyone with mod powers (?) happens by and can fix it, thanks in advance.

dpcan 17y ago

I see what's happening here. He's taking a shot at Flash. Right? No, he's taking a shot at a terrible web designer. Wait, no again. It must be taking a shot at a restaurant owner who saw a moving website with flying cheeseburgers and thought it was really cool and demanded the same thing from the web development company he/she hired. So, "Website" that's totally ignoring me, I apologize for accusing you of being Flash, when in reality it's your advertising and marketing decision makers who are clueless.

sonnym 17y ago

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned allmenus.com - a bit menu-centric, but still lists the hours of most restaurants. It's a spin-off of campusfood.com, so it has online ordering capabilities built-in.

dpritchett 17y ago
See also Memphis-area startup http://www.MarksMenus.com http://www.MarksMenus.com. This one came out of Startup Weekend in 2009. It does menus and per-dish reviews with user comments and reviews. I'm not affiliated but I did meet the founders at SUWMem.

pg 17y ago

http://fukisushi.com http://fukisushi.com

eam 17y ago
http://elfarolitoinc.com/ http://elfarolitoinc.com/
- Semiapies 17y ago
  That's the most useful "under construction" page I've ever seen.

johnl 17y ago

Why don't you create an app that solves that particular problem and give it away free on the condition that you can dish up and split Google ads on the app. Create a site where they can automatically update their hours. Some simple loan calculators made good money referring people to mortgage companies a few years ago.

kaiserama 17y ago

I worked on this problem for about 6 months, I had built a simple hosted solution, for restaurants in this case, that the operator could build a mobile version of their site that was viewable on iPhone, Android, and Blackberry. The first few places I told the idea to loved it and so I thought it might take off. Unfortunately (fortunately?) for me I happened to talk to two restaurant operators who actually used social media and 'got it'. When I started doing more market research with other operators and restaurant marketers the basic reaction was simply this: operators are too busy to be bothered with frivolous things like websites, and for some even email addresses. They're just trying to get through the month, the week, the day without closing the place up (obviously a lot of turn over in the industry). My personal take is that the next generation of operators will likely be more receptive and will see the value in using different forms of media and accepting that people get their information in very different ways than even 5 years ago. I think there are other ways to make money in the restaurant industry, if I was someone looking to do something in this industry I'd start making some connections with the US Foods and the Syscos of the world, alone you'll be lucky to even get face time with an operator, let alone convince them to use your product. If anyone is interested one of the restaurants that used the service was here http://www.edinagrill.com http://www.edinagrill.com, access from your iphone/android/blackberry and you'll see a mobile version vs normal browser.

autarch 17y ago
I'm not sure you "got" it, based on the horrific flash nav menu, and the ridiculously small window all the info is displayed in (I have more than 300 or so vertical pixels!).
- kaiserama 17y ago
  That's part of their full site. If you're accessing from an iPhone, Android, or Blackberry and haven't disabled Javascript you should see a mobile friendly version. Other devices may display it differently.
stevenwei 17y ago
How long ago was this? I've seen a couple of companies that are building generalized template solutions for restaurant owners to export websites, iPhone apps, etc.

jasonlbaptiste 17y ago

grr, i cant find the company/post, but a long while back sergey brin invested in a startup that basically listed information for a business' operating hours.

autarch 17y ago

Here's an exception - http://evergreen-chinese.com http://evergreen-chinese.com All HTML and CSS, hours, phone #, and address all on the front page. Menu is in HTML and kept up to date.

sebastianavina 17y ago
let me guess... one of your projects.
- autarch 17y ago
  Not exactly. I'm friends with the owners, and when they wanted a website, I handed them off to a designer friend of mine who I know does good work. I do host the website and keep the menu up to date for them, though.

metamemetics 17y ago

I'm in the midst of designing a restaurant website right now. They initially asked for Flash, but I showed them a jQuery\html\css design instead. They really liked it and it wasn't a problem. Also using Django as a CMS for mailing list and menu items.

ThomPete 17y ago

This seems like a pseudo problem, no? Don't most people use exactly everything else than the restaurants website and instead yelp.com, allmenus.com.

icefox 17y ago

+1 for movie theaters also. I have one right down the street that I have didn't go to for years because it was just a big flash box that I could never use to find out what they were playing. I want to give them money, but I don't think they get that.

radley 17y ago

dev: I just made an incredible site for you - it's totally HTML5. rest: I can't see the video. dev: you have to use Google Chrome. rest: I Googled Chrome. It took me to a picture of YouTube. Is my video on YouTube? dev: no - that's a picture of a browser with YouTube in it. You have to download it. The browser I mean. rest: I already have a browser. It's called Firefox Explorer or something. dev: No you have to use this one. It's the best. rest: but it says beta. Doesn't that mean it's not done? dev: it's fine. It's better than your browser. rest: How is it better than my browser? My customers don't even have that browser. dev: because it's a standard. So everyone has to use it. rest: I want my Flash site back. dev: No! Flash is bad! It's not open source. rest: I'd rather be open for business... la la la

jauco 17y ago
Me: oh no. Not another annoying video. I just want to know if they have a table for two at 8pm tonight!
ZeroGravitas 17y ago
dev: I just made an incredible site for you - it's totally HTML5. rest: I can't see the video. dev: There is no video. You're a bloody restaurant, not Lady Gaga.
- radley 17y ago
  rest: Can I at least use a nice font? dev: NO FONT FOR YOU!
radley 17y ago
customer: I'll have the lamb and wild rice please. waiter: good choice. [minutes later] Here's your meal. Enjoy =) customer: WTF? What is this? Is this… is it... cat food? waiter: it's what you ordered. See on the foil in big letters it spells out "Whiskas Lamb and Wild Rice." Enjoy =) customer: I can't eat that! It's gross! waiter: oh please. According to our pushy web developer, flashy presentation is overrated. It's food, it's edible. Enjoy =) customer: but it will taste terrible! waiter: Have you seen Jakob Nielsen's website? Taste is irrelevant. customer: but this isn't even people food. waiter: you're not Lady Gaga. [apologies for flogging / not letting this go... I couldn't resist the opportunity to mix Whiskas and Nielsen together in the same bad joke... I need help.]

Groxx 17y ago

Restaurant websites are indeed a special kind of hell. They're nearly universally Flash'd up and annoying. My solution for restaurant-website-woes, especially for simple things like hours: phone. Their automated answerer will probably tell you before you could navigate their site. Especially with Goog 411, I rarely use my computer for business phone numbers any more.

payjo 17y ago

Am I missing something here or do people not just go to yelp? They have hours for most businesses. Or is this post more aimed at new ventures and the importance of having hours on the site?

thetable 17y ago

I find it sad that many restaurants are so bad at SEO, or maybe they just can't compete with Yelp and their spammier friends. Often, it's nearly impossible to find the one authoritative website on a restaurant, bar, or store - the one owned by that business. Instead, search engine result pages tend to be dominated by crappy Yellow pages entries that may or may not include the correct phone number of the place, but never photos, the menu or the hours.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

timdorr 17y ago

It's funny to read this because we just did this for a client: http://www.bluefinatlanta.com/ http://www.bluefinatlanta.com/ Hours on the front page, menu in HTML, zero Flash. Not even that hard to do, realistically. Before, they didn't even show up in Google's results for "Atlanta sushi". Now they've actually got some content to index. I get that it's easy to market flashy sites, but it's also easy to market search engine optimization too.

tjic 17y ago

As I wrote yesterday in a different comment: People who submit stories: please submit the URL of the article, not the anchor-laden URL of the comments. This happens all the time, and it's annoying. Thank you.

roedog 17y ago

I appreciate the practical and intrinsic value of a good website, and how a restaurant owner may not appreciate the difference in work quality of web design consultants. What I wonder is why should they care? I think that the success of a restaurant depends far more on the food, service, and setting of the restaurant itself. Setting aside we discerning HN readers, very few people choose where to eat based on web design. I have a theory from observations of restaurants in my city. The restaurants with neon "OPEN" signs in front tend to be more empty than the ones without the OPEN sign. This is across all price points and styles. My thinking is that they are not filling tables, so think they need to let people know they are open and to come eat there. If people are not eating at your restaurant, will making a good quality website with accurate hours help you?

scarlson 17y ago

Or, you could have just phoned the place and asked whoever picked up the receiver. While I agree that restaurants could do well to have iPhone accessible store hours, I don't think it's totally unrealistic to phone in and politely ask the maître d’.

eldenbishop 17y ago

Sometimes it is just laughable...I went to a website on my phone to look up the menu. I got a "flash required" message. I was at home so I dug out my laptop and went to the site. The "Flash" application was a static image with the hours and phone number printed on it.