[cookiecaper]

As with most things, form trumps substance when you're selling websites to a local business. They want to have a sexier website than their competitors. Their competitors all have sites with big Flash intros and cool animations and stuff. This is what your layperson cares about when viewing your portfolio; they don't care about functionality across platforms, they don't care about accessibility or immediacy of pertinent information. They just want something that looks "pretty", and even "pretty" usually just turns into useless gobs of Comet Cursors, background music, and Flash.

[timdorr]

Actually, we've found success in converting restaurants away from Flash by touting the SEO benefits of pure HTML. Once client of ours ( http://www.bluefinatlanta.com/ ) had their site entirely in Flash (not even a PDF menu!), but showed up nowhere for "sushi bars atlanta". We redid the entire site (with a HTML food menu, thankyouverymuch) and now they're number 2. They're getting a ton more traffic (which they can also now track more effectively by having unique pages) and have totally seen the benefit. It's definitely one of our better case studies for other prospective clients.

TL;DR - You've got to sell them on the business aspects, like SEO.

[hartror]

I agree wholeheartedly. It is a lack of understanding on the part of the business owners for about what a website is FOR and a lack of interest in educating them on the part of the developers on these websites.

I'm sure this isn't an original idea but web development firms should offer a subscription package to owners. This subscription would assist them in monitoring the performance of their total web presence (not just the website which is becoming less relevant these days) and assisting them in improving it. It could certainly prove a point of difference in a saturated market especially if you got a great case study or two behind you to present to customers.

The difficulty is that site developers are just programmers and designers and not salesmen and marketers so they either don't understand or care about what I just talked about or don't know how to sell it to the business owners.

[chunkyslink]

I know what you are saying and this might be the attitude of people who own one restaurant. But when you start dealing with chains and bigger businesses they are much more interested in using the site to engage their customers. It needs to be a delivery method for offers and competitions and like the other commenters point out, SEO is a massive consideration.

Bums on seats is the bottom line.

[stcredzero]

As with most things, form trumps substance when you're selling Y to X.

Such things tend to devalue the Internet. I think this is part of the problem Yelp is trying to solve.