LTHForum.com

Slate has an interesting article up concerning the topic of why restaurant websites suck.

Overdone - Why are restaurant websites so horrifically bad?

I always get the tasting menu there...so I don't burden myself with having to make menu selections.

Do you call ahead to tell the chef that you're coming?

Here's one of my favorite (bad) restaurant websites. I suppose bad isn't a fair term. Someone spent a lot of time to come up with this final result.

http://www.macarenatapasnaperville.com/

If you click around, eventually a video of a man will come up and explain how to use the website. I assume because the site is so unintuitive.

Found this thread through a friend, funny stuff.

I actually design restaurant websites, so it's always nice seeing what you guys want. Beyond the actual design though, what I find most important these days is actually being connected, i.e. in particular Yelp (35% of their users do it through their mobiles, looking for somewhere to eat, shop, etc.) and Foursquare. Facebook & Twitter are great for your regulars, but the former two is where a lot of the new business is at. Pretty websites are great, if people actually see them

I did get a plausible-sounding explanation of the design process from Tom Bohan, who heads up Menupages, the fantastic site that lists menus of restaurants in several large cities. "Say you're a designer and you've got to demo a site you've spent two months creating," Bohan explains. "Your client is someone in their 50s who runs a restaurant but is not very in tune with technology. What's going to impress them more: Something with music and moving images, something that looks very fancy to someone who doesn't know about optimizing the Web for consumer use, or if you show them a bare-bones site that just lists all the information? I bet it would be the former—they would think it's great and money well spent."

Not coincidentally, designers make more money to create a complicated, multipage Flash site than one that tells you everything you want to know on one page. Bohan, for one, isn't complaining about the terrible state of restaurant websites. Menupages, which lists each restaurant in its database by menu, operating hours, price, and address, is one of several sites that benefits from bad restaurant pages. (Yelp and Urbanspoon are also good resources.) Menupages' menus are formatted as Web pages, whereas many restaurants require you to spend time downloading a PDF file. 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. But, again, this reduces usability, and pushes people to use third-party sites.

Here's one of my favorite (bad) restaurant websites. I suppose bad isn't a fair term. Someone spent a lot of time to come up with this final result.

http://www.macarenatapasnaperville.com/

If you click around, eventually a video of a man will come up and explain how to use the website. I assume because the site is so unintuitive.

If you click around, eventually a video of a man will come up and explain how to use the website. I assume because the site is so unintuitive.

But, come, on. Don't you remember stuff like this? (Link to parody of GeoCities-era sites.)

I loved Dysfunctional Family Circus.

You apparently have forgotten GeoCities and Angelfire websites circa mid-90s. Or, heck, even user-designed MySpace pages from not-too-long-ago. Flash did not destroy the internet. Bad design is bad design, regardless of whether it's Flash or HTML. Flash is overused, and makes it that much easier to come up with crappy bells & whistles that do nothing for the surfing experience but slow it down. But, come, on. Don't you remember stuff like this? (Link to parody of GeoCities-era sites.)

If you love Dysfunctional Family Circus, you'll adore the Nietzsche Family Circus.

Flash has destroyed the internet.

I wouldn't go that far, but there's a reason why Flash is used so much on websites despite so many people hating it.

Love it. This must have been done around the advent of the internet, when people didn't know how it worked.

I don't know if my screen is especially dark, but the "man" is just a head, a shirt and tie, and two waving hands. Hilarious.