[ZoFreX]

As someone who has built a fair few restaurant sites, there are lots of reasons.

If a web design agency builds a site that doesn't work on the iPhone or iPad, which are both now considered critical to restaurant marketing, they get to charge extra for creating an iOS specific version, or an app, or whatever. If you create one site that works great on everything, you make less money.

Restaurants are also sometimes run dreadfully. There's a particular type of chef that just cannot delegate, cannot let go of the details. Some of the biggest names are barely breaking even - in recent news the "best restaurant in the world" shut down, having never made a profit!

Then there's communication: People running restaurants are often all over the country, hard to get hold of, it's quite difficult to get decisions made.

On splash screens etc: If the client wants it, they want it. You can try to talk them out of it but at the end of the day if they insist, you gotta build it, and sometimes what they ask for just isn't easily possible without flash (sorry!)

It's a bit unfair to pick on restaurants, to be honest. Pick a random, non-chain business off your high street. How good is their website? How many of them use flash? A lot of low-end websites are still in that quagmire, but the meat of it is that you don't need to visit the website for most of these businesses but for restaurants the web has become critical, so you notice it more.

Lastly, to anyone out there that does make restaurant websites: Push back. Try to explain to your clients why it's not such a great idea to use flash, or intro screens. Try to explain the use-cases etc, and above all show them there is a very good business case for having a good website. My current employer actually specialises in restaurant websites and I'm really, genuinely proud of what we're doing - and our clients love it too. It takes effort and it's risky, but helping your client have the best website possible can pay off.

Edit: Between this article and the recent attack from Cracked, I'm feeling a little under siege, especially as both were fairly light on actual facts. An issue that came up in both:

> This is because restaurants often don't have tools to update the text on their sites—saving and replacing a PDF file of a menu is easier than messing with the code on the site

This is a horrible simplification. In many cases the PDF menu is produced by a design agency, which is certainly a lot more effort than updating text on a website. It's also not hard to code either a PDF uploader or a page text editor or both, but you'll find plenty pick the PDF uploader. If you spent that sort of money on a PDF, you'd want to upload it too! And of course the menus are often very designed and they want that control (which the article does cover on other points)

My question on this issue is: Is a PDF download really so bad? It's not something I personally find particularly intrusive and for a restaurant menu it seems suitable enough.

[dagw]

in recent news the "best restaurant in the world" shut down, having never made a profit!

I think you're seriously mis-representing that story. First of all the restaurant didn't shut down because it wasn't making money, but because Ferran (the head chef/owner) simply wanted to do something else. Secondly Ferran has stated several times that running the restaurant at a loss is a conscious decision. He could easily turn a profit, but that would mean being open all year (the restaurant was only open 6 month of the year), charging higher prices, and compromising on the food, non of which he had any interest in doing. He sees owning the "best restaurant in the world" as a marketing tool, and a place to park his R&D expenditure for his other food ventures, and more than makes up for those losses with his other food businesses.

[jcnnghm]

I have about 120 paying restaurant customers, and I couldn't agree more about the PDF menu. You could give them the slickest, easiest interface in the world, and they'll never use it. They don't have time. The PDF menu already looks good, they already put a ton of time into it to get it exactly right, and they don't want to duplicate that effort. Restaurant menus are meticulously laid out and a lot of effort is put into their creation. It would take a lot more time, and a whole lot more money than 95% of restauranteurs would be willing to put into it to create HTML menus. It would be very difficult to generate a menu creation tool that would please even a small percentage of restaurant owners, since they all want wildly different things, and are almost universally very picky about their menu.

There is exactly one reason why most restaurants have bad websites, and that is money. The average price they're willing to pay for a website is $500-1800. It's rare to hear of one paying over $2,500. It's not necessarily that they're cheap, it's that they have no money, or think they don't need it at all, so only want the bare minimum. The good restaurants don't need a website, they have a two hour wait every time it isn't raining, and the restaurants that do need a good website have no money.

Most people grossly overestimate the profitability and ease of running a restaurant. I estimate that as many as 40% of restaurants are run unprofitably in perpetuity because the economics of the location are impossible. The owner purchases the restaurant, runs it for two or three years, runs out of money, sells it to the new owner who runs it unprofitably for two or three years, runs out of money, and the cycle repeats. You probably sit in restaurants like this regularly and think, "This place must be a goldmine, it's always packed." It isn't, it's a money pit and the next guy that buys it is going to discover that as well. If you are thinking of starting a restaurant to make money, I suggest you purchase the land and build a building that can house a restaurant, then lease the space to someone else, it's the only reliable way.

Running a restaurant is also a lot more difficult than most people think, and many owners amplify the difficulty by having little or no business management experience or training. They got into it thinking it would be easy, and thought they could handle it because they've been eating in restaurants forever. Take order, cook food, serve food, simple stuff, right? Restaurant employees are always stealing from the restaurant, especially the bartenders. Customers can be very, very difficult. The staff will be flaky. There will be problems, constantly and forever. It's not easy.

[mgkimsal]

The PDF menu already looks good, they already put a ton of time into it to get it exactly right, and they don't want to duplicate that effort.

Well... why bother cleaning the outside of your restaurant - washing the windows, trimming the landscaping, cleaning around the dumpster, etc? They've already put so much effort in to making the inside of the restaurant look perfect, why duplicate that effort?

A good website - fast loading, clean info, nice pics, optimized for the web - gets people to decide to spend money with you by coming in. A nice custom menu gets people to decide how they'll spend money with you (and how much).

This shouldn't be an either/or decision, but it appears the majority of owners don't think this far ahead. Given the little I've known about restaurant owners (worked in a few restaurants growing up), this is not at all surprising.

[jcnnghm]

They do that stuff because it doesn't really cost money, and because if they don't, they will always have empty tables. It's as simple as telling the existing staff to go do it.

The good website you are describing probably costs at least $5k, which is more than they have to spend. It also means they have to find someone that can do the work, tell them what they want, pay them, manage them, and evaluate the output. It's time consuming and expensive.

[gaius]

Restaurant menu design is a highly specialized field, and there are many companies around that just do that. Everything makes a difference, the layout, the fonts, etc etc.

[JoeAltmaier]

Um, many don't clean outside. I can't count the number of restaurants I've had to walk thru a minefield to reach from their parking lot. Old broken kitchen equipment parked out in the rain, broken cement, rusty signs, litter under every half-dead bush and tree.

[bosie]

If you don't mind me asking, are you running those 120 paying restaurant customers as a SAAS type of deal or is each an independent individual?

[jodrellblank]

The good restaurants don't need a website, they have a two hour wait every time it isn't raining, and the restaurants that do need a good website have no money.

If a website was essential, it would be worth borrowing to get one made.

Is it not, or are they unable?

[jcnnghm]

They usually can't get any more credit either. I've had everybody from small local restaurants to large national chains bounce checks. It's not uncommon for food and alcohol distributors to require that some accounts pay in advance with certified checks for this reason.

They have to borrow to open, and costs are always higher than expected. This causes them to cut things from their budget, like websites. They can't get more credit later because the business isn't putting up the numbers and they are already having difficulty paying all their bills. A banker will hand you an umbrella when it's sunny, and take it away as soon as it starts raining.

[phishphood]

as someone who ran a restaurant a night club -- everything above is correct.

[carols10cents]

Yes, PDF download is that bad, especially on mobile. It will likely be larger and thus take longer than html, and in many cases requires opening a different app.

[romansanchez]

It certainly is.For example, opening a PDF on the Firefox browser(Android) automatically prompts a download of the pdf.

[prawn]

(Web designer here, but also someone who eats out a lot and looks at a fair few restaurant sites - including via iPad when on holiday.)

When I click a dinner menu link and it opens as HTML and not as a PDF document, I get a quick sense of relief and greatly appreciate it. Can't stand PDF menus, sorry.

[Goladus]

> My question on this issue is: Is a PDF download really so bad?

It's getting better, but it's still a hassle to download and open a pdf. Well-designed html is much preferred for me. That said, a well-designed PDF that downloads quickly is better than a poorly-designed menu section that loads slowly or worse, is inaccurate.

[tomkarlo]

Yes, it's really bad, because it's generally totally unnecessary. Menus are generally almost entirely text (unless you're at McDonald's or the Chinese take-out), so there's essentially zero gain from making them a PDF. Meanwhile, they're slower to load and if you're on a device that doesn't support PDF, you're just SOL.

[simonw]

Menus are way more than just text - the layout, relative sizing etc are often very carefully designed to Make More Money.

Salon had an article about this last year: http://www.salon.com/food/francis_lam/2010/02/22/how_menus_m...

[mgkimsal]

It's foolish to think that a PDF representation on a 3" screen (or a portrait screen which almost all screen are) has the same effect. The context is different - in a restaurant, I've made a decision to be there, and I'm sitting down physically holding the menu in my hand, often with music in the background, the smell of the food in the place, sitting with friends/family, etc.

In a restaurant, we're in "impulse buy mode", and menus may be oriented around maximizing our impulse buys. Almost without exception, people looking at a website are in research/decision mode, and the same presentation in both makes for a crappy experience.

Rather than using the same stupid layout/pricing tricks in a crappy PDF on a website, they should be using 'tricks' like showing us the hours of the restaurant so we know if we drive 20 minutes there they'll be open, or the 'trick' of answering your emails as quickly as you answer your phone (indeed, another trick might be answering your phone pleasantly with clear, paced speech that most people can understand).

[tomkarlo]

Taking something designed to work in print and attempting to blindly replicate it (without interpretation) in a totally different medium is a way to Make Less Money.

[user24]

> Is a PDF download really so bad?

I much prefer a PDF menu. In fact I actively look for a menu download link when I eat out, which is often. It reassures me that I'm seeing exactly the same menu that I'll see when I sit down at the table. Too often the website has a little bit of html showing a 'typical menu', and I'm left simply not knowing if the food on the site is the food you're offering tonight.

But when I see a PDF that's clearly exactly what was sent to the menu printing company, that's perfect. Too often I've sat down in a restaurant, looked over the menu and thought "actually, there's nothing here I really fancy".

[mgkimsal]

It'd be nice to have both, but the PDF is often too small to read on most screens, requires a lot of scrolling, etc.

Similarly, just because you have a PDF menu doesn't mean they have the food on the menu.

PDF menus that simply say "daily soup" or "ask for our specials" are pretty much designed for in-store use only, and basically useless on the web for decision making. When you're in a restaurant already seated, you can deal with uncertainty by ordering something different. When you're on the web, you deal with uncertainty by going someplace else altogether.

[dunham]

I think for the places we go to, a PDF menu is more likely to be accurate. The menus tend to change every few days and PDF is more likely to be part of the menu creation process than HTML.

My favorite restaurant (contigosf.com) just uploads a jpg of the menu - kinda unfortunate, but on the plus side they update it daily.

[user24]

yeah all good points. If there was a html menu that delivered the same confidence as a PDF menu the that would be much better, as the html version would be more usable on mobile devices etc etc (and just generally more webby).

[radishroar]

Yes PDF menus are terrible, especially if you are making a decision on a mobile device.

[Bockit]

Regarding the PDF menu question I recently took on a client, a cafe, who was asking for a drupal-backed website. For menus I laid out the options of having it backed by the CMS, or PDF downloads. I explained the benefit of having the menu be HTML vs PDF and ran through the workflows of updating it via cms vs uploading new pdfs.

The response was overwhelmingly PDF menus, only for the simplicity of the workflow. Despite a demonstration of how easy it was to use the CMS to update the menu they really just didn't want to spend the time doing that.

[Egregore]

>Is a PDF download really so bad? It's horrible, it slows the browsing, on most mobile devices it doesn't work properly and sometimes it crashes them. Actually the best solution would be to have one place to fill the menu and it will generate both pdf for printed menu and web page from that data.

[elithrar]

> Is a PDF download really so bad?

I think a key attraction to the PDF menu download is that it allows them replicate their menu layout and style on their website. A menu change or update would require a website update otherwise (i.e. if the design changes) and that's real dollars.

[mwexler]

>A lot of low-end websites are still in that quagmire, but the meat of it is that you don't need to visit the website for most of these businesses but for restaurants the web has become critical, so you notice it more.

Ummm... isn't that all the more reason to make sure it's accessible on a mobile, is enticing to the user with relevant content, and assists them in making a sale (reservation) with ease?

[ZoFreX]

Yes, but a business barely ticking over can't afford to drop 10k on a website to draw in what, 10% more people? How long will that take to break-even? (And of course if you're running at a loss instead of a profit, the answer is never)

[mgkimsal]

Personally, I'd be willing to work on a rev share basis with a restaurant on their website if they left control to me, and I had a degree of freedom in promoting it. Build a nice reservation piece, mobile alerts, etc. I'd have incentive to make it work, restaurant doesn't have to pay a lot up front, etc. They do it with opentable, why don't more restaurants work out web deals with web agencies for ongoing revenue share?

[ZoFreX]

Lots of restaurants have cash flow issues or aren't even making a profit even in the best of times. This would be a seriously risky move for a web agency in many cases and I would strongly advise against doing it unless you can afford to not get paid at all.

[mgkimsal]

it would have to be contingent on trusting both sides to be honest and open re: finances. I'm thinking a little bit more of the groupon model - you pay me for every successful booking (or, booking that turned in to a paying customer). Given how many food places seemed to JUMP on groupon, they could take it one step further and say "instead of one time influx of bargain hunters, we'll manage your website - to our definition of good - and you pay us $x/table"

[encoderer]

Another reason certainly is a lack of resources (cash) to commit to the project.

Sure, an established, profitable restaurant should have no trouble funding a modest, tidy, professionally built site. But the truth is, most restaurants youre visiting aren't "established" and "profitable."

[jdminhbg]

The restaurant website topic comes up frequently, and this is a frequent response. But there are two reasons it's clearly wrong:

1) Restaurants could jam their hours and menu onto a free theme for much less money than they spend getting a bespoke Flash monstrosity and be vastly more usable, yet do the latter anyway. 2) There are lots of cash-strapped small businesses around that don't have as uniformly unusable websites as restaurants.

The issue is not money.

[HSO]

I think you are both right, once you "de-identify" said resources and cash. That is, the constraint here is not cash but brains/skills/knowledge/time/effort. Many people simply don't know what is possible. I used to run continuously into this kind of problem when I worked for other people (guys who just don't know what is _possible_, not even talking about being able to do it).

[ZoFreX]

> for much less money than they spend getting a bespoke Flash monstrosity

Actually, that Flash monstrosity with animations and music playing is the cheap option. You don't even need a coder to produce a website like that, just a designer (whereas you usually need at minimum a designer + a coder to build an HTML website). The thing about sucky websites is that they are made by sucky companies, and sucky companies are cheap! (Also many sucky websites are made by very good companies that just have no choice when a repeat client only has a pittance for a new site)

[thomaslangston]

There are free options for hosting and website creation for HTML. $0 < Designer.

[encoderer]

I work for a startup that sells to restaurants. This -- the money issue -- is what the sales guys who go into these places every day have told me when I asked them why they think the websites suck.

I trust their judgment, so we can just agree to disagree on this I suppose.

[romansanchez]

Wouldn't you agree that building a Flash site is harder, more expensive than a simple HTML/CSS site?

[ZoFreX]

Absolutely not. You need a designer to design and build the entire thing in one application for the former, and someone to build the PSD, then slice it, write the HTML and CSS... Flash is a much faster workflow, and it's a workflow that more people are good enough at to make a passable website.

[ZoFreX]

This is absolutely true and in the current climate not many small businesses (which is really what restaurants fall under, whether they are a tiny mom & pop or internationally renowned they are not typically very large organisations) can spare the cash to make a truly awesome website.

[smiler]

What was 'the best restaurant in the world' that closed down?

[simonsarris]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14352973

[nfriedly]

Mind if I ask what company you work for?

[ZoFreX]

I don't really want to pimp it out because that's not why I'm on HN, but if you want to talk in more depth my email address is on my profile :)

[jsavimbi]

> This is because restaurants often don't have tools to update the text on their sites

That part struck me as well, because it's complete and utter bullshit. The tools exist, they've been implemented for years across a variety of industries and they come in all flavors. There should be no need for a restaurant operator to ever have to get on the phone with their technologist, and I use that term loosely, and request an item change and any developer with a couple of years experience should know that.

The reason they're so shitty, imo, is that restauranteurs are ocd-minded workaholics who spend most of their time focusing on their own operation and very little time researching the technology aspects of their industry or comparing themselves outside of their business column. Just pick up any of their trade publications. They simply don't have the time or the inclination and more often than not the money to go out and hire a bonafide design or technology firm to implement a solution for them. They see what other restaurants are doing, calculate the costs of copying them and call it a day. As long as nobody else is innovating, why should they?

Another aspect of the business that leads to poor internet marketing is the people that they have filling those positions. I'm willing to bet that upwards of 90% of the people who make the decisions on the restaurant's website have a) no business experience, b) no technology experience, c) no desire to be anything than someone who works at a restaurant, as long as they don't have to serve food or pour drinks. They are, and having worked in the industry for many years, mostly an underachieving lot who are most happy sucking down a cold beer that a friendly bartender comped them. Seriously, I build web-based, cross-platform financial applications and my restaurant friends still ask me to help them with the Yelp. They have absolute no clue what the internet has become in the past ten or twelve years. And if they can get their favorite cocktail waitress' friend to put together some crap website, then they're just as happy. More often than not, you'll have to print the pages out and send the paper site along with the invoice so they can look it over.