Why Are Restaurant Websites so Terrible?

Wednesday, 02 March 2011 | by Pat's Picks

Every restaurant website is unique. But there is one thing they all have in common says the Boston Globe: they’re bad. Badly designed, badly executed, badly maintained. No matter how good the food at a certain establishment is, a trip to its website will invariably unearth “Flash animation, embarrassing techno music, and menus that turn out to be PDF files.”

The Globe says there are some pretty straight-forward reasons for the horrible crop of restaurant websites, namely, time and money. Swapping PDFs in and out of a website is much easier for a chef on a deadline than embedding new code. Also, it costs a lot of money to start a restaurant, which usually means websites are an afterthought and subjected to the “I have a nephew who knows computers” treatment.

The Globe article was inspired by a Tumblr blog that showed up late last year entitled, “Never said about restaurant websites.’’ In addition to poking fun (“The lorem ipsum looks good.”), the site offers practical tips to help “make a less horrible website.”