Why Restaurant Websites Are So Horrible
Posted: August 15th, 2011 | Author: steve | Tags: Poor Functionality, Restaurant Websites, Terrible Design, Website Design | View Comments
I always wondered why most restaurant websites sucked so bad. It’s all starting to make sense to me now.
“The first thing that pops up when you visit the website of the San Francisco restaurant Fleur de Lys is a nearly full-screen animation of celebrity chef Hubert Keller’s autograph. That makes sense—when I’m choosing a restaurant, the first thing I want to know is Can the chef sign his name?
Wait a second, though. What does Chef Keller look like? You’re not going to bother with this place if the chef doesn’t have a good headshot. Good news! After the signature, the site fades into a snappy photo of Keller. Fortunately, he’s a looker—think Peter Fonda with Fabio’s hair.
After the autograph and headshot, the site transitions to a “main menu,” which presents you with links to Keller’s other restaurants and his PBS TV show. Tempted though you are, you stay focused and click for the San Francisco restaurant. One bit of advice: If you’ve got a subwoofer attached to your computer, now’s the time to crank it up, because you’re in for some auto-playing, royalty-free, ambient techno smooth jazz! As you stifle your urge to get up and dance, you click around in search of information about the restaurant. (The page emits a friendly beep every time you click.) If you spend the better part of your lunch hour scouring the site, you’ll eventually find the menu. What you won’t find is the price—it takes a Web search to determine that the tasting menu at Fleur de Lys costs $72 a person.
By this point, you’ve likely been so beaten down by the music, the nested menus, and the interminable “Loading …” prompts that you’re considering Taco Bell for dinner (though it too has a terrible site). Still, I’m not arguing that Hubert Keller is responsible for the worst restaurant website ever created. That’s a bit like trying to decide on the most awful serial killer in history. The head-poundingly awful Fleur de Lys site is just one of many in an industry whose collective crimes against Web design are as routine as they are horrific. If you think Fleur de Lys is ugly, check out the site for New York’s Buddakan, which launches a full-screen window, auto-plays sitar-heavy technopop, and subjects you to a series of flying panels every time you click. (Eater NY described the site as “like the Inception trailer, but with summer rolls.”) Next, check out Cavatore, an Italian restaurant in Houston that hired Web designers who were either a) on a Monty Python-besotted acid trip, or b) looking to induce epileptic seizures. Seriously, this site is so bad it’s evil.
While lots of people have noted the general terribleness of restaurant sites, I haven’t ever seen an explanation for why this industry’s online presence is so singularly bruising. The rest of the Web long ago did away with auto-playing music, Flash buttons and menus, and elaborate intro pages, but restaurant sites seem stuck in 1999. The problem is…“
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