Restaurant Websites can Generally be Atrocious
The Salon.com had a wonderful article called "Overdone - Why are restaurant websites so horrifically bad?". It that talks about the what I think is the worst kind of website mistake that till this day is still occurring. In the last 5 years or so a general group think concretized among web professionals that the playing of music at the moment a user lands on a website can be considered obnoxious, along with pushing a website fullscreen on arrival. There are a lot of sites online that still have music upon arrival but they tend to be older sites. The other day I was looking through some South florida sailing websites and out of 14 or so websites 1 played some music and they all seemed to have been live on an average of at least 4 years which means that to say the least sailing website developers are fully aware of the havoc that could insue when a user visits a website that plays it's own jams.
The over-the-top monstrosities that some restaurants put up on web-servers and call a "website" are a strange breed indeed. I'd liken it to a branch of web reality that's stuck somewhere in North Korea where it plays more to engaging the eye with pageantry than providing truthful insight and openness. For some reason restaurant try to re-create digitally what is somewhat really happening. It almost feels like I've got to go through too many formalities just to see a menu. Restaurant website designs are usually a mangled UI disaster that can potentially drive hungry customers away.
I'd prefer a minimal site that's 5 pages and a menu any-day to a site that's trying to overwhelm my senses.
Now if your one of the top restaurants in your town and a minimalist style just wont do then try something like what Le Cirque has done. Their website is classy, clean, and loads in less than a second. If I'm somewhere on my ipad I can easily navigate the site and glance at the menus on the go. The menus aren't PDF's therefore load a lot quicker on mobile devices, their menus are coded into the site and hopefully manageable via a CMS.
Generally all web designs need to follow the golden rule of answering the users need's so hopefully with all the negative attention restaurant sites are getting, owners as well as web developers will serve begin to serve their online patrons a well designed user experience that's a pleasure to consume.
-Jose Tavares
