[starwed]

>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.

I noticed medium sized bands tended to have the same godawful outdated website style, especially European metal bands. No idea if it is still like that -- I just started avoiding any such "official" pages.

[lytfyre]

professional (especially wedding) photographers are also common culprits.

[MaxGabriel]

Yes there seem to be fields where this problem is just rampant. Liquor websites are the worst of any I've seen (milagro, 1800, avion, grey goose, appleton, smirnoff, etc). Some are pretty good: Bacardi offers an HTML version, St. Germain is largely non-flash, Jose Cuervo (while really slow for whatever the reason) is non-flash.

With liquor I always thought that it was that 1) some brands have trouble differentiating themselves 2) the desire to create a 'culture' around their beverage--and that seems to fit the OP's description of the restaurant industry

[artursapek]

Liquor companies' ads and websites are like those of car companies. I think it's because there's so little to say about such obvious products. Vodka is pretty much legally required to all be the same.

[jamesteow]

Some professional photographers say they use Flash because they want to protect their images from being stolen... despite the fact that you can screencap them?