[note: when you see a painful restaurant website, can you please send them a link to this post or copy and email this to them? It is in all of our best interests that we get better restaurant sites. Thanks!]

Dear Restauranteur,

We realize that as an entrepreneur you wear a lot of hats, but you probably aren’t a web professional. So, we would like to humbly give you some advice to improve the web experience for your customers.

Why we come to your website

Ideally, we want to do all of the above in 1 click without having to wait for all kinds of stuff to load.

A few simple suggestions

Please don’t use Flash We realize that lots of restaurants think Flash sites are cool. But almost all of them suck. Folks on iPhones and iPads can’t even see your site (33% of us). Those who can see it have to wait while it loads and then shows us some “artsy” interlude before we can get to what we want. Sometimes that is so painful, we leave and go to Yelp to get what we are looking for.

Please don’t put your menus in PDFs

Its painful to have to go to another application to see your menu. And those of us who have older devices can’t see them.

Please keep your site up to date

Its not useful to see a menu from 2006.  You don’t have to be a web ninja to update your site. The same guru who charged you your right arm for some flash wizardry can set up a simple content management system for you, where its as easy as typing an email to update your site.

Please don’t blare music at us

With a few exceptions, we come first for the food and service, then the ambience. Please don’t force us to have to listen to Black Betty Remix or Toccata and Fugue just to get your exact address so we can tell our friend where to meet. Thanks for listening to us and we think a few changes will make coming to your site less frustrating. And if you think we are wrong, please Google bad restaurant website and see what folks think!

Thanks,

Your customer

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