Usability of Restaurant Websites

I’ve seen so many awful restaurant sites when trying to find a place to go eat. Even scouring through the many sites of restaurants featured on Food Network’s Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives I had a hard time finding just a handful of well-designed sites. I’m not sure who is putting these sites together but they fall victim to several follies and mistakes. So I figured that we need to take a look at what is important about a restaurant site that’s a little bit different from other sites.

Here are 3 must follow rules for restaurant websites.

1. Focus on the Food

People go to restaurants to eat so the focus of the site needs to be on the food itself. All the other aspects of a restaurant are ancillary to the food itself and if people don’t have a good idea of what they are going to be eating then they may just move on to the next choice for their meal.

Hackney’s in Glenview, Illinois does a good job of immediately spotlighting the food as soon as the user enters the site. Their site is also very neat and clean. This leads the visitor to believe that the restaurant will be similar with very clean and elegant food.  This website does a great job of highlighting the items that visitors will go to most often when visiting their site. The high quality photos of the food do a great job of prepping the visitor’s taste bud for their own visit to Hackney’s.

2. Make the Menu easy to find and read

This is the rule I see broken quite often. Personally, I like the menus to be viewable on the site itself. However, I don’t mind it being a PDF as long as I know it’s a PDF before I click. DO NOT put links to PDFs without informing visitors they will be downloading a PDF. Also, if you are a restaurant that has your prices on the menu in the restaurant then put them on the online menu (save for daily specials and other temporary menu items).

Cafe 222 (the restaraunt that is across from my San Diego condo) does a great job of this. They categorize the menu on the right hand side so that visitors can easily find what kind of food they are looking for. The dish’s name along with the description and price are then displayed for the visitor. This makes it very easy for visitors to determine if this establishment is where they would like to eat. Also, as you can see, Cafe 222 does a marvelous job of featuring the food in their backgrounds. There are only two negatives to this site: 1) It’s all in Flash and 2) The icons at the bottom are not necessarily indicative of what page they link to.

3. Make Contact information easy to find

This rule is actually two-fold. First, customers may want to call ahead to either ask questions about specials or see if they need to make reservations. OpenTable is also a great option for allowing reservations to be made online. The other part of this rule is if people have never tried your restaurant then they may need directions so, at minimum, an address is needed and directions are preferred.

Psycho Suzi’s in Minneapolis, Minnesota puts their info at the bottom of the main information on the front page. The information doesn’t have to be large or in a dominant area, but it needs to be easy to find so that people can either call or find directions very quickly. Making visitors search for this information may even mean that they get frustrated and go to a different restaurant. Easy to find contact information means more customers can find your establishment.

There are also a handful of recommendations that you don’t have to have but would make visitor’s experience much more please.

1. Put up a map or set of directions to your restaurant. If people don’t even have to manually enter the address to the restaurant then they are that much more likely to make a click and follow the directions given.
2. Post pictures, or even put up a beautiful gallery, of the establishment. If someone is looking for a fun place to go then they want to see a lively restaurant or someone may be looking for a finer experience and wants to ensure that the restaurant fits their needs. People are more likely to come to your restaurant when they have a much better idea of what they are getting into beforehand.
3. If you have a drink menu then put up that as well. Many people like to know their available selection of beers and wines when they go out to dine.
4. Tell your story. If your restaurant has a little history then it makes it that much more interesting and intriguing to potential customers.
5. Make it look good! There are far too many restaurant websites that look like they are stuck in 1995. Building a good website is a good investment and will help expand your client base to those that may not know of your establishment and are just scouring the internet to find a new experience. It’s also a great way to get out-of-towners into your place.

So if you are a restaurant or know one in need of a good website follow these rules and guidelines and you’ll have yourself an awesome website and a larger customer base!

What restaurants do you know that have good/bad websites?

What do you like or dislike that I failed to mention here.