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I wanted to check out the menu at a local pizza place the other day and this was my experience: 1) Menu link, one of two important things on the entire site (t
by wlesieutre 8y ago
I wanted to check out the menu at a local pizza place the other day and this was my experience:
1) Menu link, one of two important things on the entire site (the other one is hours) is buried in a hamburger menu
2) The menu is implemented as a fixed-size page designed for an iPad Mini (which they use as menus at the tables)
3) Different types of items (appetizers, entrees, pizza, drinks, etc) are in a horizontal bar across the top, with large font size. Since it's a fixed iPad Mini width, this scrolls horizontally. Less than half of them are visible at a time.
4) Individual items are listed by name, thumbnail photo, and price for each size. Want to know what toppings are on their "Eighth Street" pizza? Click on it! Then click to close that and click on the next menu item. Do this for each pizza, then try to remember what the one that sounded best was called, and probably go through half of them again to get back to it. Super efficient way to find which pizza you'd like.
I think the restaurant understands in concept that they should have a website, but I don't think they care to think about it beyond that.
EDIT: I just revisited this and you actually can get to the menu without the hamburger link. It's designed as one of those pages where the content is centered (vertically and horizontally) with a bunch of white space as a full page thing, so it doesn't look like you'd need to scroll, but there's actually more content (including a second link to the menu) if you try scrolling down.
I'll blame this partly on Apple for taking away the always visible scroll bar indicators and partly on this stupid web design trend of giant "paginated scrolling" pages that don't look like there's anything running off screen that you'd need to scroll to.
- titanomachy 8y agoOr, the cost of anything but the most basic development is prohibitive and their margins are too low.
- wlesieutre 8y agoI suspect they've locked themselves in to whatever crappy menu system the iPads run on. Works well enough in-house, and the website's menu existence is an afterthought. Not great since they do takeout, but for the most part I think it's a sit-in restaurant. If the menu vendor had bothered with responsive design it wouldn't be half as bad, but "here's an iPad viewport centered in your browser" must have meet the contractual requirements. A $10/month Squarespace subscription is pretty damn cheap and IIRC you don't need to know much of anything about web development to set that up.
- coldtea 8y agoDo they also cut corners with their kitchen? And the cost of web development has never been lower.
- rat9988 8y agoWhy do you resort to such sophism ?
- coldtea 8y agoWhat exactly is the "sophism"? That the cost of web development has never been cheaper is a fact. That the restaurant website is important -- that's how customers find out about it -- and shouldn't be left behind because of "small margins" is also not very controversial. If the margins are so small as not to afford some $1000 (or less) for a decent website, then what other corners have been cut?
- dwaltrip 8y agoIt is likely they don't realize or understand the actual issue. The decision-makers probably don't ever look at the menu on a mobile device. Even if they recognize that there is an issue, they may be intimidated by the prospect of finding someone who can fix it. This is in stark contrast to kitchen-related matters, which they are likely much more experienced at identifying and dealing with.
- coldtea 8y ago>1) Menu link, one of two important things on the entire site (the other one is hours) is buried in a hamburger menu I think hamburger menus should not be used anywhere except in hamburger restaurants.
- wlesieutre 8y agoSomeplace (reddit?) did a promo with a fast food chain recently where the hamburger menu was colored like a hamburger.
- platz 8y agobut how do you handle a lot of links.. 1) find a way to just diplay them all 2) put them on a separate navigation page (e.g. a second level)