4 ms·

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 sens

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.
  - pyre 17y ago
    The point is that the owner should be interested in what please their customers not what looks pleasing to them, but it unusable by their customers.
    - InclinedPlane 17y ago
      Nevertheless, this is the problem of fighting uphill against human nature. This phenomenon is made worse by the fact that patronage due to the website is difficult for most restaurants to quantify. The vast majority of restaurants are completely clueless as to how much business their websites are responsible for, which, as with most things unmeasured, leads to neglect and disrespect. If more restaurants integrated aspects such as table reservations or mailing lists more restaurant owners may come to a greater respect for the importance of getting their web presence right.
  - Proleps 17y ago
    Part of the problem is that most people think they know what their website should look like and nothing you say will change their mind.
thaumaturgy 17y ago
I have a popular local restaurant as one of my clients (and have worked off-and-on for others), so here's the scoop: the more technically-savvy restaurants get their websites from the same people that provide their point-of-sale systems, and those people are part of the "industry software" problem, such that they're constantly running about 5 years behind everyone else. This applies at least to Restaurant Manager ("RMPOS") and Digital Dining, both of which make life much, much harder for restaurant owners. Same deal for grocery stores, too. Have you ever wondered why you couldn't just load your local grocery store's website up and see what their current price for bread is, or if they're almost out of eggs? All business reasons aside, it's largely because their databases are (probably) running some hinky form of Pervasive SQL or Btrieve, which stores their information in a hard-to-decipher, proprietary format, which among other wonders "deletes" records by replacing them with nulls in the monstrously large flat file that represents their product database. (The registers communicate with the server over Samba with the help of a shared file...) For this, restaurants and grocery stores pay tons of cash. Wanna make a bunch of money? Go fix this. Restaurant owners might even name their children after you.
- wallflower 17y ago
  From my brief research into this area, it seems what restaurants want to do is increase profits. Information like who their best customers are and their preferences (like Casino VIP databases). Data on what is selling. The daily or even real-time profit/loss. Is this what the industry giant behind OpenTable does? Is OpenTable too big to fail (e.g. restaurants will continue to pay them annual maintenance because it is a legacy system)? Can OpenTable's database be cleanroom reverse engineered so that it can be migrated to a new competitor platform?
  - thaumaturgy 17y ago
    There are a few different questions here; I haven't worked with an OpenTable system yet, so I can only guess at some of it. But: > ...it seems what restaurants want to do is increase profits. Yes, but -- based on my experience and dealing with restaurant owners in my area, anyway -- they're not interested in things like metrics or VIP programs. VIP programs don't convert as well as you might expect -- pretty poorly, in fact, given the effort that it takes to manage them -- and restaurants are typically run by chefs or foodies, not by numbers geeks. Restaurants are really hurting right now, so anything that doesn't immediately get butts in their seats is going to be a hard sell. Daily P&Ls are already built into the reporting functions of the POSs I've seen so far, and they have some functions for reporting on popular dishes, although that's usually more clunky. But, the line cooks are usually the ones that tell the boss what was popular that night anyway. > Is OpenTable too big to fail (e.g. restaurants will continue to pay them annual maintenance because it is a legacy system)? Yes and no. Once a restaurant has committed to a particular POS, it is very, very, very hard to get them away from it. First, it cost them -- at a safe ballpark estimate -- $10,000 to install it in the first place, so they're going to milk it for as long as they can before paying for anything else, even if it costs them more money that way in the long run. Second, change is really scary for these folks, because if they're trying a new POS, and it crashes on its first evening, they're going to have a lot of pissed off customers and that translates directly to empty seats. It doesn't help that every single system that they've tried -- or that their buddies in the industry have tried -- have been buggy, problematic, and prone to crankiness. It doesn't matter if you know that you're selling the best system in the world at the cheapest price; the owners are still going to be really gun-shy about converting. > Can OpenTable's database be cleanroom reverse engineered so that it can be migrated to a new competitor platform? In theory, anything's possible, but I would feel pretty safe guessing that OpenTable isn't going to make that easy. They're probably using something pretty funky. On the plus side, they're probably not encrypting it, they're just relying on security-through-obscurity. So, you should be able to figure out the basics, like item description, pretty easily. Figuring out sales or quantities might be a lot harder, not to mention figuring out links between items (like, add-ons for a particular dish). To be honest, you might be better off committing staff to manually re-entering the restaurant's menu in your POS, rather than trying to convert OpenTable's (or anyone else's), and then just roll that into your price. This is not as horrible as it sounds; most restaurants have only a couple of pages of items, with a variety of add-ons. I've done this by myself in under a day, so it's not too bad.

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.
- pyre 17y ago
  The point is that the owner should be interested in what please their customers not what looks pleasing to them, but it unusable by their customers.
  - InclinedPlane 17y ago
    Nevertheless, this is the problem of fighting uphill against human nature. This phenomenon is made worse by the fact that patronage due to the website is difficult for most restaurants to quantify. The vast majority of restaurants are completely clueless as to how much business their websites are responsible for, which, as with most things unmeasured, leads to neglect and disrespect. If more restaurants integrated aspects such as table reservations or mailing lists more restaurant owners may come to a greater respect for the importance of getting their web presence right.
- Proleps 17y ago
  Part of the problem is that most people think they know what their website should look like and nothing you say will change their mind.

thaumaturgy 17y ago

I have a popular local restaurant as one of my clients (and have worked off-and-on for others), so here's the scoop: the more technically-savvy restaurants get their websites from the same people that provide their point-of-sale systems, and those people are part of the "industry software" problem, such that they're constantly running about 5 years behind everyone else. This applies at least to Restaurant Manager ("RMPOS") and Digital Dining, both of which make life much, much harder for restaurant owners. Same deal for grocery stores, too. Have you ever wondered why you couldn't just load your local grocery store's website up and see what their current price for bread is, or if they're almost out of eggs? All business reasons aside, it's largely because their databases are (probably) running some hinky form of Pervasive SQL or Btrieve, which stores their information in a hard-to-decipher, proprietary format, which among other wonders "deletes" records by replacing them with nulls in the monstrously large flat file that represents their product database. (The registers communicate with the server over Samba with the help of a shared file...) For this, restaurants and grocery stores pay tons of cash. Wanna make a bunch of money? Go fix this. Restaurant owners might even name their children after you.

wallflower 17y ago
From my brief research into this area, it seems what restaurants want to do is increase profits. Information like who their best customers are and their preferences (like Casino VIP databases). Data on what is selling. The daily or even real-time profit/loss. Is this what the industry giant behind OpenTable does? Is OpenTable too big to fail (e.g. restaurants will continue to pay them annual maintenance because it is a legacy system)? Can OpenTable's database be cleanroom reverse engineered so that it can be migrated to a new competitor platform?
- thaumaturgy 17y ago
  There are a few different questions here; I haven't worked with an OpenTable system yet, so I can only guess at some of it. But: > ...it seems what restaurants want to do is increase profits. Yes, but -- based on my experience and dealing with restaurant owners in my area, anyway -- they're not interested in things like metrics or VIP programs. VIP programs don't convert as well as you might expect -- pretty poorly, in fact, given the effort that it takes to manage them -- and restaurants are typically run by chefs or foodies, not by numbers geeks. Restaurants are really hurting right now, so anything that doesn't immediately get butts in their seats is going to be a hard sell. Daily P&Ls are already built into the reporting functions of the POSs I've seen so far, and they have some functions for reporting on popular dishes, although that's usually more clunky. But, the line cooks are usually the ones that tell the boss what was popular that night anyway. > Is OpenTable too big to fail (e.g. restaurants will continue to pay them annual maintenance because it is a legacy system)? Yes and no. Once a restaurant has committed to a particular POS, it is very, very, very hard to get them away from it. First, it cost them -- at a safe ballpark estimate -- $10,000 to install it in the first place, so they're going to milk it for as long as they can before paying for anything else, even if it costs them more money that way in the long run. Second, change is really scary for these folks, because if they're trying a new POS, and it crashes on its first evening, they're going to have a lot of pissed off customers and that translates directly to empty seats. It doesn't help that every single system that they've tried -- or that their buddies in the industry have tried -- have been buggy, problematic, and prone to crankiness. It doesn't matter if you know that you're selling the best system in the world at the cheapest price; the owners are still going to be really gun-shy about converting. > Can OpenTable's database be cleanroom reverse engineered so that it can be migrated to a new competitor platform? In theory, anything's possible, but I would feel pretty safe guessing that OpenTable isn't going to make that easy. They're probably using something pretty funky. On the plus side, they're probably not encrypting it, they're just relying on security-through-obscurity. So, you should be able to figure out the basics, like item description, pretty easily. Figuring out sales or quantities might be a lot harder, not to mention figuring out links between items (like, add-ons for a particular dish). To be honest, you might be better off committing staff to manually re-entering the restaurant's menu in your POS, rather than trying to convert OpenTable's (or anyone else's), and then just roll that into your price. This is not as horrible as it sounds; most restaurants have only a couple of pages of items, with a variety of add-ons. I've done this by myself in under a day, so it's not too bad.