> Chefs and restaurateurs are arbiters of taste offline. Their good judgment can’t simply fly out the window when they take to the Internet. So why do bad websi

> Chefs and restaurateurs are arbiters of taste offline. Their good judgment can’t simply fly out the window when they take to the Internet. So why do bad websites happen to good restaurants? Or maybe, just maybe, that "good judgement" that chefs and restaurateurs supposedly possess is only "good" when they apply to food and managing walk-in businesses? You shouldn't expect a chef or a restaurateur, however good they are, to be proficient in information aesthetics, and, in the same way, you shouldn't expect a type designer to have good judgment about managing a restaurant business. Then the article goes on to say that "the website is a sign of the times. It represents the trends of that moment." Well I got news for you -- it is precisely that sort of thinking that got the restaurant websites into the Flash-infested hole they are now. Yes, no one builds websites in Flash for restaurants today yet everybody and their grandma did five years ago. C'mon people, it shouldn't be that difficult to understand that one should follow trends only insofar as they don't interfere with readability, accessibility, user friendliness, and information clarity. Those last four principles are timeless; they don't change -- if someone truly applied them five years ago, the website would have survived and probably would have needed only a minor cosmetic change to stay current. > For designers and users, the emphasis now is on accessibility. And why wasn't it five years ago, huh? Then, "we're a small restaurant so we can’t really pay for it..." Oh please, stop the pathos -- why did all those itty-bitty small restaurants pay significantly more for a Flash website five years ago when a more accessible non-Flash version would have cost them way less? Where's the critical thinking?