Hungry for better restaurant websites

Why are there so many bad restaurant websites?

I recently had to plan a lunch meeting with a client in a part of the city I don’t normally go to, so I had a chance to try to find and then look at a number of restaurant websites. I was traveling at the time, so this searching was being done with my iPhone.

Several sites had a Flash frontpage with no bypass—meaning I couldn’t find out anything at all about them. Others didn’t give hours or days of operation, so I couldn’t tell if they were open for lunch. Few had easy-to-review menus—or menus at all.

I’m sure that for those Flash frontpages I couldn’t see were full of music and dancing icons and moving text—stuff that some designer-type convinced them would look cool, sophisticated or fun. And the restaurant manager thought: Well, we hired this web consultant, so they must know best.

But someone forgot that the key point of a restaurant website is to bring you more diners—whether in-house, takeout or delivery.

What customers want:

• A brief escription of no more than eight words
• Your hours of operation
• Your phone number and whether you take reservations
• Pictures of the food and the ambience
• Your location, including a map and driving directions
• Your menu (especially for places focusing on takeout and delivery)
• Links to reviews on other sites
• Do you cater or have facilities for groups? If so, information about that.

The first four of these should be on every page.

If you have customer testimonials or a live forum, all the better.

Even a few years ago, this could have been prohibitively expensive for many restaurants: If you have torely on your web designer/developer to make any changes, then updating your menu or changing your hours was an ongoing expense. With an open-source content management system—like Drupal or Joomla—that no longer has to be the case. You’ll pay a little more to get your site in the first place, but you’ll be able to change menu items or hours of operation yourself—it’s almost as easy as ordering stuff from Amazon—so your website can keep up with the changes of your business without a lot of hourly fees to your developer. Even a frontpage announcing the day’s specials is manageable.

Of course, as with all online marketing, it’s not all about your website. Restaurants, in particuar—even if they don’t have a website, especially if they don’t—need to be listed in the major directories that feed the iPhone and the Blackberry. Otherwise, users of those devices—who use their phones instead of the phone book or the newspaper—will never find you.

I finally found a suitable restaurant for my lunch meeting using my iPhone, and met my client there. But on the drive, I passed several restaurants that probably would have been better suited to our lunch meeting, but I’d had no way to know about them in advace because they simply had not shown up on my search, because they weren’t in the directories.

Restaurants have been particularly hard hit during this recession. If yours is going to survive, you need to be found by smartphone users, which means being in the right directories (which is cheap and easy to do) with your hours and location and a good keyword-rich description. If you have a website, it needs to work across browsers, and be light and nimble enough to load quickly over slow smartphone connections.

Don’t let some designer convince you to waste money on a Flash animation. Instead, focus on providing the information diners need to pick up the phone or walk in your door.