Washington - Why do most diners visit restaurant websites? Because we are looking for information – not animation, music or even sexy food photography.
A few things should be upfront: location, hours, phone number and menu.
In an age of diminishing online attention spans, I don’t understand why some restaurants make it hard to find such details. Neither can people who are paid to think about these things.
“We like that information on every single page,” says Valerie Zweig, a director at food and beverage consulting firm Vucurevich Simons Advisory Group.
“Don’t make people work for it.”
Adds Allison Seth, creative director of Seth Design Group. “A restaurant is a creative endeavour, and it is easy to get caught up in the cuisine and interior design and forget about the nuts and bolts of the operation.”
Freelance designer Jason Pasch theorises that some less user-friendly pages were built by web designers more used to corporate sites that don’t rely on direct customer communication.
Restaurants, heed Zweig’s advice: “You want to have the menu in an easily located space. With prices. Don’t call the menu tab ‘cuisine’ or ‘fare’ or some other term, several of which can appear on a single site and leave a customer flummoxed as to where they can find the menu.
At least Adobe Flash animations are going the way of the dodo, thanks in part to incompatibility with Apple products.
Like me, Pasch is a sceptic about website music. Zweig, though, says it can work. But provide an obvious mute button.
And although I understand the importance of photos, I begrudge large ones that take up space and push key details to the periphery.
Prominently featuring vitals makes for a better mobile web experience. Rather than develop separate stripped-down versions for devices, more sites these days are using responsive design, which adapts a site to the size of your screen. That allows mobile to be considered from the start, Seth says.
In general, everyone would benefit from Pasch’s website philosophy: “I don’t like things to be over-complicated.”
The Washington Post