Your Public Website Is for Your Audience, Not You

Here at Sonjara, in addition to making public-facing websites, we make a lot of login-based web applications for an organization's internal administration. While it's important for these apps to be both attractive and usable (because otherwise, your administrative users will not enjoy using them and may not use them at all), these are even more important qualities for your public web presence to have. After all, your public site is probably the first thing people see when they find out about you, and where they go to look for important information.

For example, when I'm not making websites, I enjoy seeking out good food and drink. I have a lot of places I'll go to regularly because I know and love them, but even so, I'm always interested in trying new places, and the first place I'll typically go to find info on a new bar or restaurant is its website. Okay, this is not entirely true; rather than typing nameofawesomelydeliciousrestaurant.com in my web browser, crossing my fingers, and hoping that it doesn't send me to either a restaurant in Boca Raton, FL or a site that would be better served by one of those new .xxx domains, I will actually Google the restaurant name. The first things that come up are usually Google map entries and Yelp reviews, which are also helpful but generally not what I'm looking for just yet. I want your actual restaurant website and I want to find all the information I'm looking for on it, within a few clicks or less. Maybe I'm a demanding consumer or maybe I'm expecting too much. But guess what? I'm your ideal consumer. I eat out a lot. You want me to come to your restaurant, and you want to make me happy. If this isn't the case, you might be in the wrong business.

Important tip: Put yourself in my (your audience!) shoes. If you were going to a website for a bar or restaurant, what would you expect to see there? I know I'm always looking for the most basic information and I want to find it as quickly as possible because it's probably 9:30 on a weeknight and I've forgotten to feed myself again and I need to find out if your restaurant is open until 10 (in which case I won't come bother you when your kitchen is obviously closing soon; hey, I have friends in the restaurant biz, I get it) or 11 (in which case I'm so totally there).

Things that I am looking for on a restaurant website:

•  Location: I want to make sure the French bistro I'm going to is in fact the one a few miles from my house and not actually in France, unless complimentary plane tickets just happen to show up at my door. Or, as previously mentioned, Boca Raton.
• Hours: Did I mention that my husband and I have this nasty habit of eating dinner at the continental hour of 9:30 p.m., so we want to make sure the kitchen will still be open?
• Reservations: And if I need one, I don't want to have to call. I want to be able to make it online.
• Menu. Please, please, PLEASE show me the menu so I can get excited about the offerings and maybe even make a decision before I even get to the restaurant. Oh, and did I mention it has to be the current menu, and easily accessible?

Things that restaurant websites typically have on them:

• An animated splash page: And it's usually Flash, so I can't see it on my mobile phone, which may be how I'm looking at your website, especially if I'm already out and about.
• Music on auto-play: Horrible. If you're a restaurant and not a musical group, there is no reason for there to be music on your website. I'm a musician and I still feel this way. Even if you are a musical group and not a website, don't ever, ever, ever auto-play music on your website. Put a feature somewhere on the site where folks can click and listen if they are so inclined.
• PDF file menus (usually out of date): Ah, the dreaded Portable Document Format. Hey, at least it loads on my phone most of the time. Maybe it'll load on my laptop if my plugins are up to date with whatever browser I'm using today. But the fact that you have to upload and then link to a separate file called Name%20of%20Awesomely%20Delicious%20Website%20Menu%20Fall%202012.pdf and then remember (and have the time) to upload a new file and change the link every time the menu changes instead of just making a simple edit in your content management system (if you have one) or to your HTML code (why don't you have a CMS again?)... take a breath. It's okay. Just put your menu on a page on your site and make simple updates whenever it changes.
• Most of the information that I want, but buried deep within the site: Hours and location might be on an About page or a Visit Us page or a Contact Us page or I don't know where.

Burying your location and hours somewhere beyond the front page is just silly. That's key information that prospective diners are looking for. This should be a no-brainer for improving your site: If you don't have the location and hours on your homepage, put them there. And ditch the Flash;  most users are loading the site on their iPhones and can't see it anyway, and we don't want to hear music while we're most likely at work but taking a five-minute break to make dinner plans for that night. Don't worry, your restaurant is still a beautiful and unique snowflake even without the animation and music. Actually, since a majority of restaurant websites seem to have these unnecessary distractions on them, if you get rid of them, you WILL be unique (and well respected).

As for most restaurants' serious dependency on using PDFs for their menus, here are what I think are the potential arguments restaurant proprietors might have for using PDFs, and I'll provide a more elegant, accessible solution for each one:

         The PDF looks just like my printed menu, with my brand and my fonts.

• Solution: Incorporate your brand and fonts onto your website. You should already be doing that anyway. No, your print design and your web design don't have to match exactly, and they probably shouldn't, because onscreen is an entirely different medium than print and users digest information on each quite differently. However, common elements that define your brand, such as colors, logos or wordmarks, and fonts, should be reflected in both print and web. The exception: If your printed materials use nothing but fancy serif fonts that may be too difficult to read onscreen, then it's probably a good idea to pick another font for the main text on your website. Brief header text typically looks okay in any font as long as it's large enough, but don't ever take this for granted. Test it on a stranger first. Preferably a stranger without perfect vision.

         Putting up a new PDF is so easy compared to changing the content on my website.

• Solution: Are you using a content management system (CMS)? If not, you should be. It makes changing text on your site just as easy as (if not easier than) adding a new static file like a PDF. Plus, changing content on your site instead of just adding new files is a really easy way to make your site look more dynamic. Whenever the menu changes in print, make sure to reflect those same updates on the website.

         I don't want my website to just be plain boring HTML.

• Solution: Make the design exciting enough to stand on its own. PDFs certainly aren't earning you any points in the whole not being boring category, anyway. But note that this doesn't necessarily mean putting photos of your food everywhere. Check out this example of a restaurant site, which is all one page but has all the information potential diners could need to know, as well as being beautifully (yet simply) designed: http://www.beastandthehare.com/

In fact, the whole inspiration behind writing this post popped into my head when I saw Beast and the Hare's site after a San Franciscan friend of mine chatted me up to say, "Hey, check out this restaurant I'm going to tonight," probably in an attempt to make me jealous of his culinary pursuits. But instead of being jealous of the admittedly awesome-looking food he was going to eat, I was instead angry that I had never before seen such a simple and informative yet still beautiful restaurant website.

To say that I was furious, in fact, would not be an overstatement. This seems like such an easy problem to solve, and it's frustrated me repeatedly since the mid-2000s. It doesn't seem like things are getting better on the whole, though Beast and the Hare gives me a glimmer of hope and I want to go there and give them all my money as a result. Well done, Beast and the Hare. And now, step out of my shoes as hyperactive restaurant-goer and into the shoes of your audience, whoever they might be, whatever products or services you offer. What is the most basic information they are coming to your site to see? How can you elegantly display that information and make your audience happy? If you're still at a loss, ask us for help. 

In the meantime, have you noticed this same phenomenon, or is this a sign I go out to eat too much? What are the best and worst restaurant or bar websites you've ever seen? Are there sites out there that are more guilty of these sins than the food and beverage industry?

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Your Public Website is for your Audience, not you.