Business web pages frequently don’t have correct business hours.
Sure, but they’re more likely to change their website than to have contacted Google to change their hours.
That said, I don’t mind the information being behind a single click on said website, as long as said click is obvious. Though I agree it seems dumb on any site where the only real way you can interact with them is in person.
(Also, I make exceptions for franchises. I’d much rather not have them automatically know my location just so they know which store is closest to me.)
So… you’re saying my website shouldn’t start you off with a splash page with a map of the world and ask you to select your country from a list of 193? How else will I convince you that I run an internationally connected global enterprise of a pet store?
[/s]
Yeah, that is dumb. I don’t want to have to tell them my exact location, but it’s not that hard to detect the most likely country the person is coming from, or even the most likely state. Just guess, and leave a box to change if if you’re wrong.
And if you want to look international, show some small emoji flags or something.
I agree that that approach is often “easiest” in terms of the options that business websites actually give you, but it’s definitely not the “easiest” approach that they COULD give you. What would really be easiest would be seeing the desired information right there on the business website homepage.
That’s why Google uses AI to automatically change the hours listed in Maps.
So you can either waste time hunting around the business website for out of date business hours, or you can get the wrong business hours straight from the Maps app, with the added bonus that the Maps hours might be more correct than the business knows.
Most of these problems aren’t caused by actual website design professionals. They’re caused by businesses that are too cheap to hire a web design professional and does some sort of crappy Wix or Square site that has bad templates that don’t prompt them to put the right info in the right places. They can’t figure out how to add a menu. They just want a link to the half-assed online ordering system they bought in to, because even though Wix is easy it’s still not easy enough for them to figure out how to add a menu and keep it updated, which is why they got a Wix site in the first place so they could make their own updates. They are good at whatever business they do but they are not good at The Internet. But Facebook is easy so they can make posts and updates there. And Google Business sent them an email reminder to review their listing so now their hours are correct on Google but they lost the Wix password so that site is useless.
Anyway…don’t fuck web designers. It ain’t us doing this. Maybe, MAYBE “web designers” but usually not even them.
Obligatory xkcd: University Website
And I heartily endorse this pitting.
I have the suspition the small businesses do it to look like the big businesses, they crave respectability and want to exude seriousness. And the big businesses do it because they do not want their customers to contact them. Customers are just trouble to them, they mostly just want to complain. Therefore: no-reply e-mails, call centers, hidden contact detail.
Also web designers, like all people, tend to be lazy. Their clients don’t give them good or detailed instructions? They take the usual template, is “good enough”.
Just like my bank’s website.
I don’t have Facebook either. Do better!
Oh, I am so sick of businesses saying, “Check out our Facebook page,” with nothing except a link to Facebook.
I do have a Facebook page, but I hate using it. It is only good, to me, for keeping in touch with old friends, and even then, I only check in about once a month. If none of my old friends have said anything, as is often the case, I ignore Facebook for another month.
You’re not going to get me to check out the new pub on Third Avenue by posting a Facebook page. Post a real website, with a real menu. Ignore Facebook, and I’ll be happy to visit your site, both virtually and in person. Direct me to Facebook before I visit, and I’ll go to eat and drink elsewhere. It’s just that simple.
I’m between Gettysburg and York. If I say southern PA people think I’m from somewhere around Breezewood and if I say southeastern they think Philadelphia. I guess I should just say somewhere near Gettysburg.
South central PA (Carlisle native)
Some of those Facebook pages are just as bad. I catch some guy trying to promote his restaurant on FB and posts something on a local group. No address, no hours, you go to their page and you can’t find a menu behind 50 pictures of happy patrons and plates of food.
I went into a small brick and mortar business in my town that’s only been there a short time; maybe a year or two. Or I tried to, rather. It was locked up tight in the middle of the day. I peered through the glass door but couldn’t 100% say it looked like they were still in business. There were no hours posted on the door or anywhere.
Confused, I left and came back the next day. This time they were open, and I talked to the owner. (He’s the only person I’ve ever seen working there.) Turns out I had been there on a Sunday at 3:15 p.m., and he happens to close on Sundays at 3:00 p.m.
When I suggested “You should post your hours on your door or put a sign in the window or something.” His reply was “That’s not a bad idea.”
Jesus Christ, people, put your freaking hours on your door! Then take the next logical step and do the same thing on your website if you have one.
When it comes to restaurants and menus, I find yelp to be very useful. Go to yelp’s review of the restaurant, find the photo gallery, and you should see a filter just above called “menus”. Clicking it will winnow out all photos except those of their actual menus, and each photo should be dated so that you know you’re looking at a recent menu and not one from pre-pandemic.
Occasionally in the picture gallery will be a photo of the restaurant’s hours, as posted in their window. Again, check the date of the photo.
When I Google some business to find their hours, the page listing the Google search results will usually have a side bar to the right of the list, with the hours listed in a drop-down format. Of all the options, I’ve found this to be the most accurate. But it’s not 100%.
And for businesses that actually post their hours in their windows, could you please print the hours in a font larger than about 1/2 inch? I usually have to park the car, get out and walk over to the window, and squint at the sign from a few feet away.
Exactly. The high ROI from a website project comes from needing fewer people to answer phone calls. But I think in this day and age, most people would only want to call for something that they can’t find or do on the website. My issue is that I’m mobile-only, except at work, so can’t always get all the functionality if they don’t have a robust iOS interface. EZ-Pass is a good example of this, in which I can’t add/remove cars from the mobile website, so have to annoyingly breakout the laptop. Optimum (my cable provider) must be near the bottom of any ranking, as I think the website is so awful for just about everything, that they get a lot of calls. And apparently they’ve decided that the best way to combat this is by having a customer service department that consistently makes you question whether you’re the victim of a prank.
The “web site developer vs. business owner” dynamic reminds me a bit of the doctor-patient dynamic vis-a-vis overprescribing of antibiotics: sure, patients can scream from the rooftops that they want an antibiotic for their kid’s runny nose, but the doctor has the last word on whether it’s appropriate.
Similarly, it’s difficult for me to imagine (as a former VP of a couple of NYSE-traded companies) why a customer-facing (ie, in-person) business wouldn’t want their contact essentials and hours on their site and always kept current.
So the web developer is well placed to suggest that the business may want to include it, but I’ll throw the bulk of the shade at a poor (unless I’m missing something) business decision.
Let’s face it, though: there are some kinds of business (e-commerce, for one) where a physical location is not only irrelevant, but maybe not something you’d want to make public (don’t drive down here and harass my employees because your widget broke on first use).
A surprising number of businesses don’t exhibit common sense in the Internet age.
I was interested in visiting an out-of-town plant nursery. They do mail order but also have a retail store. The website invites people to visit the store, but there is zero information on the site about the store’s business hours. By painstaking search I managed to find an e-mail address, and fired off an e-mail asking when they were open. No response. Eventually I made the trip after seeing on Google that the place supposedly was open the afternoon before I went there and lo and behold, it was open.
A retail place closer to home decided to do only curb sales early on in the pandemic. For about the past year, their website has asked customers to be patient, promising that they’d open the store soon on a limited basis. Hasn’t happened. They continually provide updates on new stock, but the message about “opening soon” and policy for curb sales only remain the same.
It’s a wonder that retail closures aren’t more frequent.
Therefore I apologize to web designers everywhere 
. I see the practice so often that I’ve assumed that this was some sort of established convention.
In fact, as a someone who only uses the stuff, if I was storyboarding a website for my fictitious business, the front/first page would be “Welcome to Velomont Systems. We are located at blah blah blah (see the map below) and our business hours are:…”
Devil’s advocate, but most companies nowadays do not want to encourage people to physically meet them for an exchange of goods and services. They want you to do it online so they don’t have to pay cashiers or stockboys or security guards or whatever.
This actually vexes me more than not having the contact information. Usually when I go to a website, all I want to know is - where’s my stuff? Where’s the thing I ordered? Why is there an outage with my internet/electricity/water? When will it be fixed?
But that’s never front and center. They funnel visitors directly to “Check your payment status! Pay your bill! Get information on paying your bill! Read your last bill!” I don’t need any of that shit, I set up direct deposit a long time ago. I don’t want to use your “exciting new app”, I am not looking for interesting new ways to pay my bill.
If an established customer with an immaculate payment history is reaching out to you, that means something bad has happened. You need to tell him what’s wrong instead of dunning him for a payment that’s never once been missed in 17 years.
To tie this back in with the OP - there was a local restaurant where I tried to look at the menu on their website, but it wouldn’t let me see a menu without starting an online order, but for some reason wouldn’t let me start an online order. Eventually I figured out that it was because the restaurant wasn’t open on Sundays and therefore the website wasn’t accepting orders. But nowhere on the website did they publish what days or hours they were open, so from the user perspective it just seemed like a really glitchy website. Really, really sucky website design all around.