Thank you so much for this post. I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years asking clients why the hell they want to use complex blogging software to create simple brochure sites?! Turns out that’s what people trying to sell them business have been telling them they must do. And I’ve felt like a lone voice when I’ve been saying it, and in fact doubting myself and wondering if I’ve missed something crucial in my comprehension of the subject.
I opened this thread to post about this - glad I’m not the only one who’s irked by this.
Sure, restaurant menus change, but generally not all that fast. If they leave off the prices (or just include a line saying, “prices are as of MM/DD/YYYY, and are subject to change”), they’d probably have to update the website just once every few years.
It’s not like web-hosting for a simple page costs that much, and they can probably find a high-school student who can design their web page for a couple hundred bucks, tops.
And then people can find them on the Web, which is how most people find anything these days.
And that high school student designs something that looks like someone puked on your computer monitor, and they don’t understand anything about usability or user interaction so the info your customers want isn’t where they look for it, and then you buy a domain name and hosting but have no idea what actually happens with those, so when you finally come to a real web company to get a real website we have to run around trying to track down some idiot high school kid who controls your domain name and you’re lucky he hasn’t sold it to your top competitor.
Run-on sentence of frustration!
I’m restoring an old radio from the 1970s. A business on Long Island has an online catalog that shows replacement antennas, but there’s no prices next to the item and description (it’s in a table at the bottom of the page, alongside the model number), just like an old-fashioned parts catalog), no pictures (just text descriptions), no indication of whether it’s in stock, and only one page on their site with any kind of contact information.
I went to a science and engineering high school; one of the best in the region. It offers a computer science major; not “how to use a computer”, but programming in high-level languages. Its Web page looks like something one would find on Geocities in the late 1990s.
I think you’re being too hard on them.
After all, their pages are up dated on line weekly.
twitch
Restaurants that have enough $$$ to have a decent web presence tend to lean toward Flash.
In other words, their beautiful web pages, with dancing animations and all of the frufru that a proper Flash site allows, is useless for an iPhone user.
Five years ago this was fine. These days, they have to understand that tens of thousands of people per day are buying new smartphones, and a web site that requires Flash will be useless to the person who is in a car with friends trying to figure out where to eat.
They don’t even need to make a custom iPhone app; just make an alternate mobile-friendly web page and keep their ugly Flash page for desktop users.
Oh man, that site is so horribly adorable. I love it! Even though I know I shouldn’t. The pictures on the front page are super neat 
I agree. It’s a clean design that will render perfectly well, I expect, on an old 486 running IE 4. That’s not a trivial consideration; if you’re wealthy, old, and not all that tech-savvy, it’s not inconcievable that you wouldn’t have replaced your desktop since the mid-nineties. (Yes, hard drives will eventually fail, and old ones are impractical to replace; but gently-used machines will last quite a while.) Perhaps less far-fetched, that design should also play nicely with pretty much any screen-reader software.
There are still changes I’d make - I don’t care for the font choice or color scheme, but neither are actively offensive.
Craigslist, on the other hand, would probably benefit from being less aggressively text-based; it feels sloppy and “busy” to me.
God help me - is that site for real? I’d poke around a bit to find out, but I don’t think I can stand that much exposure to the thing
I haven’t seen frame-based navigation since 2002.
I notice there’s a “call now” exhortation, but no hint of what time zone they are in. One can deduce that it’s the UK time zone, but it’s always a good idea to be clear about things like that. And why not have the shop locations and contact info up front as well?
Yes, it actually says that. I think they mean, “Internet fabricators”, but I’m not sure.
I’m going to send this to my friend the web designer as an example of What Not To Do. They need an editor. With a flamethower.
PS: the title bar simply says, “New Page 1”. There was an older version? That was worse…?
That site really hurts my brain (not to mention my eyes) but all their contact info is visible, without any scrolling, right there under the line “SERVING CUSTOMERS ON LINE SINCE 2000 [11 YEARS]”.
That’s the head office. The shops are linked further down. I got to the listing of the shops, and was greeted with further horrors.
For example, there are maps. The map images are scans of printed maps with the locations scribbled on them in ball-point pen.
On the shop chooser page, there’s a picture of Andy, the warehouse manager, who is “ALWAYS HAPPY TO SLIP YOU A LENGTH”. Oddly, the company van looks quite respectable (it only has two colours).
I am forced to conclude that the design of these pages is some kind of elaborate in-joke. The needed information is actually present; the page is up-to-date; there is a reference to the company’s Facebook page… it’s just that they are not only clueless about web design; they are actively anti-clueful.
I just visited the website of a local bookstore. The website is a horrible mishmash of 90s-era animated GIFs and the like, but they do have a little search box at the top so that you can search their inventory. I typed in the name of the book I’m looking for and got the following result:
Great job, guys.
If I come across a website like that, I assume it hasn’t been altered one bit in years and that the business may, in fact, have gone under or at least is one of those mysterious businesses that seems to be closed every time you go by.
As others have said, give me that over a splash page that launches a full-screen pop-up window that takes 10 seconds displaying a “loading” bar before playing a Flash animation that leads to a page with no actual selectable text on it etc etc etc any day!
The only thing that irritates me about it is the way they spell web as WEB as if it were an acronym. (FAX is another one that gets the clueless ALL CAPS treatment most of the time…)
Repeat after me, folks…
- The internet is a distraction from Real Business.
- The internet is a toy.
- The internet is something edumacated con artists will try to sell you.
- The internet will cause your identity to be stolen and all manner of depravity posted in your name.
- Even if all the above are not true, the internet is a dead business that collapsed around 2000 with that thing they call the dot-com boom, while the real world went on doing business by phone, mail and fax.
The whole site was worth it for this photo… http://fabricland.co.uk/borednow.jpg
Another problem with restaurants that have money: They try too hard to recreate the vibe of their brick-and-mortar location, and end up having a totally annoying site, like this. (Warning: music, annoyances)
There was actually a Slate article about this earlier this year: Why Are Restaurant Websites So Horrifically Bad?
No.
This is exactly the article I was thinking about. It’s amazing how many higher-end restaurants use these Flash abominations, play music, etc.