Many Restaurants Remain Oblivious to Mobile Web
A few years ago, for reasons that are still unclear, restaurants that created web pages went wild for Flash and graphics. You'd go to a restaurant's website and be forced to watch some lame animation or other alleged art, and then have to endure even more of it just to find out what was on the menu. You still do, in many cases.
This customer-unfriendly system is made worse with mobile phones. I'm heading to North Carolina early next month to give a couple of talks and was looking for places to eat in Chapel Hill, one of the stops. Bad move (on an iPhone, anyway). I did a Google map search and got a link to a place that, when selected, produced this image:
Not terribly helpful. But aha -- when I expanded the page I noticed a link called "Menu":
This was promising, until I clicked that link and got this:
Maybe they'd have more customers if potential patrons could actually see what they have to offer.
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The pizza joints that let you order online are also flash-intensive so you can't order pizza from your phone on the way home from work. Maddening.
Too many restaurants remain oblivious to the plain old stationary web, getting them to go mobile is another decade off likely (despite their best interest in cultivating their online presence).
Try www.opentable.com/. A lot of the time they will have menu's on their own website without having to go to the restaurants home page.
Added bonus: Reviews!
I like what kottke.org did this week in making a mobile version (m.kottke.org). I wonder if any other websites are considering a mobile friendly version?
(hint, hint)
Top of the Hill is still worth eating at...if you can sit outside on the patio. Check out the Lantern as well.
I'm really shocked by the number of businesses that do have a website, and list all sorts of irrelevant things like photos of the staff, and a story of their creation, and blah blah, but lack very basic things like hours of operation, or a phone number. ("Call for reservations?" Well, I would if I knew your number.)
Places you should eat in Chapel Hill:
The BBQ Joint
Milltown
Squid's
I can list more if you'd like.
I've never been terribly impressed by the food at Top of the Hill.
Its because tiny eateries like that have websites made by their kids or cousin or somebody that is an obvious amateur, who's idea of a "profeshinul lookin" website is what you see above.
A chinese place around the corner from my office has a website where the link to their menu begins the download of a 9Mb PDF file with full color photo's etc which promptly freezes up on DL because their site is hosted on some arcane machine sitting in some students closet down the block. Basically its the restaurateurs lack of money... and the fact that good design and programming are seen as something anyone can do and that is good enough.
Well said.
Mobile access is definitely key for restaurants. Simple, accessible sites are the best way to facilitate that.
However, it's worth noting that mobile web browsing was, quite frankly, a joke until just a couple of years ago.
The iPhone is the first to feature a *real* browser. Most phones *still* feature an unusable proprietary, non-standards compliant 'browser', many of which can't even render *simple* pages correctly. Frankly, these things aren't *worth* supporting for all but the largest sites (like NYTimes).
Opera Mini/Mobile, mobile Safari, SkyFire, and the upcoming mobile mozilla browser are slowly changing this.
It'll be a few more years before the average mobile device actually has an acceptable browser. And only then will it be worthwhile for smaller developers to really spend serious time ensuring a decent mobile user experience.
Until then, the best we can hope for is for them to not develop crap-laden, flash-based monstrosities.
Yes, thank God for Open Table. Imagine... a restaurant website that's actually useful!
I seriously doubt restaurants need their own websites for anything, or that it impacts any sales/reservations.
With sites like MenuPages and CitySearch, and services like OpenTable -- all their pertinent info is available online... along with patron reviews.
I would also add that you should skip top of the hill...unless eating at a frat house is your thing. Place is full of frat boys. Food nothing to write home about.
While in Chapel Hill, you should try Lantern. Amazing food and cocktails (I recommend eating in the lounge). It's one place from NC that I miss now that I live in Portland. And they have a non-flash, iPhone-friendly website.
lanternrestaurant.com
I would be more inclined to get an Iphone if apple got over their phobia of Flash
There's a fantastic French-Vietnamese sandwich shop near my place (Bah Lee) whose website is like a crash test for operating systems.
Seriously, we tried opening it in firefox, chrome, opera and IE and the flash was so borked it nuked them all.
Great Sandwiches though.
Most restaurants have limited budget and limited time to devote to current tech. Besides, apart from a current menu & hours you might not necessarily want to go to a restaurant's site to find out what's up with it. I agree with the poster above — third-party apps are the iPhone way to find restaurants. Searching "restaurant chapel hill" in yelp brings up most of the best spots: Lantern, Jujube, Elaine's, Akai Hana, Mint, Crook's Corner (for the upscale); Carrburritos, Pepper's Pizza, Southern Rail (for the casual). Also add Milltown, Panzanella, Margaret's Cantina, and you're on the right track. (I suppose the other powerful restaurant recommendation tool is a question posted on a widely-read blog.)
Ugh! Don't go to Top of the Hill. Overpriced (and it's not that expensive) and their beer is sub-par. If you're looking for a lunch spot, go to Allen and Son Barbecue for real, wood-smoked, eastern Carolina style 'que. If you're looking for a fancy dinner spot, head up 15-501 to Durham and go to Magnolia Grill- it's up for the James Beard Award (Oscars of the food world) this year for "Outstanding Restaurant." I work for neither place, but have been eating here for 6 years.
I think most restaurateurs see a web site as a necessary evil (and I use necessary in the loosest possible way), just another vendor trying to suck their precious (and razor thin) profit margin, and have better things to worry about. So what is the most polite, yet most effective way to let a restaurant owner know that their website is hurting & could be improved? I've tried offering improvements in barter for food credit, but it rarely ends up being satisfying for either of us. Or they don't want to hurt the feelings of the son/niece/wife who "built" the crap page. Usually it's just not on their radar.
A basic HTML page, void of complex scripts, flash, or even CSS is plenty for most restaurants.
I seriously doubt restaurants need their own websites for anything
Where else are they going to display the photos of their delicious cuisine with the iStockPhoto watermark still in place?
Using your iPhone for everything: LOL
I recently read that Fab's in Sherman Oaks had reopened. It was mediocre in its previous incarnation, but I thought I'd check out the menu on their web site. I found their home page, but all of the buttons/links were dead, so I couldn't see the menu or their reservation page. I called the restaurant and asked to speak to the manager, and someone eventually came to the phone to whom I described the situation and suggested that if they're paying someone to maintain their web presence that they shouldn't be. I checked today and it's still the same.
I think it's safe to assume that Fab's is just as lousy as before.
And I'll echo the comment of others that Open Table is a good choice.
I've noticed this a lot in local (Providence, RI) eateries.
The Red Fez, one of my favorite places, has no website.
Haruki's (http://www.harukisushi.com/) is godawful - flash intro, PDF menu, crap everywhere.
Downcity's (http://www.downcityfood.com/) is lovingly crafted out of undisguised tables.
Unfortunately, DownCity has one of the best sites - no flash, no stupid intro page, and the menu is easy to get at. Other generally OK sites always have PDF menus for some reason.
This is the sort of thing young designers should cut their teeth on and do for $50-100 a pop and save everyone a bunch of trouble.
#9:
I'm really not that familiar with phone surfing, but my understanding was if you designed your webpage to be accessible to screen-reading software, braille strips, high contrast large font user-imposed style sheets, etc, the natural result is that it's perfectly usable under anything post-dating LYNX. And often in LYNX too.
Designing a website so it can only be used at x-by-y resolution, with graphics turned on, and some stupid plugins installed, is HOSTILE and unprofessional. Use graphics, sure. Use stupid flash plugins, sure. Just ffs try viewing it at 320x200 with all the accessibility features in windows turned on, for once.
I sincerely doubt that restaurants are really missing out on the millions of people you seem to think are basing their decision to dine there on a view of the site's webpage on a mobile phone.
Don't blame the restaurant owners. They have food expertise, but no technical expertise. They go in the yellow pages and find some company that makes cookie cutter sites for restaurants. The restaurant owners are wowed with all sorts of fancy flash animations, and they fork over the dough.
Wouldn't it be great if boingboing had a css file for mobile phones so article text went right across the screen rather than losing 1/3 of the width to whitespace and ads?
Maybe your phone should be able to run flash.
Is this a cross-post from the White Whine blog?
I agree with #7, there's way better things than Top of the Hill. Try Buns and Milltown near Franklin Street. For dessert, I'd recommend a place called Sugarland. All are on the UNC Campus.
Will have to give opentable and the others a try on my iPhone.
I agree in that it'll take a couple years (even here in tech savvy N. Va) for restaurants - and businesses in general - to figure out best practices for mobile devices.
Not only are flash-only sites a pain, but also the sites that tag you as a mobile device, or in some cases as an iPhone, and then don't provide all the content their normal site has - and no method for viewing the normal site.
what do you mean, 'For reasons taht are still unclear"? People love self-expression. Most restaurant owners are not savvy enough to understand form-below-function.
Another good non-restaurant example is to try to read the user manual for the dr dre headphones from mobile Safari. Apparently Monster doesn't know one of their big audiences...
Are you serious?
With all due respect, half of the internet isn't mobile-friendly, there are iPhone apps for that (teehee), it makes more sense to complain about the iPhone's lack of Flash support, and this smacks of unbearably whiny upper-middle-class solipsism.
Sure, as a general design rule, excessive Flashiness is a non-starter. But, you know, duh.
I am really surprised more restaurants don't set up a simple online ordering system. All you would have to do is set up an online billing system that sends an e-fax to the fax machine at the restaurant. It is cost effective and easy way to set up an online ordering system.
@16: Most restaurants have limited budget and limited time to devote to current tech.
It's not an issue of budget or time. The site uses flash and then when a particular menu is selected a PDF file opens up in a separate window. This is a deliberate choice, not something foisted on them by a low budget or lack of time. One would expect a pared-down HTML-only site to result from such constraints.
The site was obviously designed to impress the restaurant owners, not to be accessible to the greatest number of people. A more functional site would likely have appeared less impressive to the clients.
here's how not to do it:
mobile.pizzahut.com
1. no menu
2. must have already established an account via pc browser
3. can't get to normal online site
Yeah, this is a maddening problem. The blame rests squarely with clueless "web designers" who've sold restaurants on these goofy, pointless, piece-of-crap websites.
Their site works perfectly on my Nokia N78.
I'd say this time the problem lies in your choice of a phone, which lacks basic web functionality which other smartphones have had for years.
The blame rests squarely with clueless "web designers" who've sold restaurants on these goofy, pointless, piece-of-crap websites.
Every small business that I've done a website for has tried to get me to put in a flash slideshow on the home page and I've talked them all out of it. As a general rule, the smaller the business: the greater the desire for bling.
"This is a deliberate choice, not something foisted on them by a low budget or lack of time."
That's right, every restaurant has a full time designer on hand, not some paid-by-contract lackey who never got a degree and foists PDF laden Flash pages on unsuspecting (and moronic) customers.
But I'm with the commentators who state this sounds a bit whiny and could be more readily solved by in between apps that get flash into a mobile friendly form.
This has been driving me crazy for a while now. I hope that this post draws attention to the problem. I keep emailing restaurants and their design firms about this issue. None of them have even replied much less developed user friendly sites.
Restaurant sites should have mobile versions, even if it's just a mobile-friendly style switcher.
Of course, the iPhone really should support Flash. Not to enable goofy website animations, but because a useful portion of the web requires it. The only reason it doesn't is that Flex apps would allow an end-run around the precious AppStore. Don't believe anyone who tells you differently.
And for some of the best food in Chapel Hill, start with Lantern and Jujube. Three Cups for Coffee.
Rather than random mobile-Safari web searches, I use the Urbanspoon iPhone app. User voting, location awareness, a pretty comprehensive resto list . . . what else do you need?
As for dining in & around Chapel Hill, start with Virtualinc's recs in #16 (http://www.boingboing.net/2009/03/20/many-restaurants-rem.html#comment-445787) and add the following:
Burgers at Buns: http://www.bunsofchapelhill.com/
BBQ (and other smoked delights) at the Barbeque Joint: http://www.yelp.com/biz/the-barbeque-joint-chapel-hill
Amazing sandwiches at Sandwhich: http://sandwhich.biz/blog/
I'm no fan of Flash-based websites.
Back when all-Flash websites were first appearing, it was a nightmare for those of us designing for emerging companies. The promoters wanted everything to be animated and distracting, but they completely neglected the fact that Flash text couldn't be indexed by Google. Its frustrating trying to explain to someone that good search results are more important than an animated brick of gold.
Flash content, like Java, are applets, and therefore should be used to supplement web content, not replace it.
Two things. Apple has been working with Adobe to get a version of Flash that works on the iPhone. In fact it has already been announced that Adobe should be close to completion.
Second, and if your from out of the country I apologize since I know T-mobile is the iPhone carrier outside the USA, But you might not want to show everyone you are using a jailbroken version of the phone.
Weaver Street, in carrboro for great fresh/local stuff
http://www.weaverstreetmarket.coop/
and gugelhupf Bakery and Patisse is well worth the easy 30 min drive to Durham.
http://www.guglhupf.com/
Restaurant owners may be forgiven for being a little behind the times since they probably didn't go into the business thinking the web would be a core foundation of their business model. Apple, on the other hand, is supposed to be on the cutting edge of this stuff.
What's more reasonable: to expect every restaurant to regularly check their web sites for the latest compatibility standards, or to expect an iPhone that can run a near-universally supported plugin?
Your all cretins. Breadman's is the place to go.
I can't believe none of you mentioned Crooks Corner. Lantern is amazing but very pricey. Top of the Hill is mainly frozen apps dipped in batter and deep fried. Lot's of great local beers in and around Chapel Hill.
My personal major peeve: sites ABOUT Blackberry that look like ass ON a Blackberry.
@ sharpiesniffer #1
"The pizza joints that let you order online are also flash-intensive so you can't order pizza from your phone on the way home from work. Maddening."
I have the new Google G1, it has this cool feature where you can type in numbers, and it makes a "telephone call" which allows me to communicate voice-to-voice with the guy on the other end. I often use it for ordering pizza. Pretty awesome feature.
I get that same little cube instead of some videos when I go to boingboing.net on my Iphone. Are we practicing what we preach against?
seriously?
is it not safe for a restaruanteur to concentrate on creating and serving good food to the people brave enough to actually set foot to pavement and walk by?
do they need to first consider catering to whatever technical specifications required to avoid you and your inane, suburban, technocratic simpering?
maybe if you sought to explore the world with your own hands, feet, and eyes, you'd generate memories worth twittering about, you boring simp, you.
p.s. your prius is stupid, too.
damn... you're all missing the point here... we're all getting screwed by the mobile phone industry that's years behind the commonly used technology, and that's only a scheme that allows them to filter out all those new obvious features that should've been enabled on our phones that you guys crave talking about when it finally "comes out". Unfortunately for us the end-user we are still the little bitches of corporate America and its endless thirst for more of our money. What's terrible is that we have grown completely oblivious to the fact that their main interest isn't to give us the best technology nor to be working their hardest at coming up with new shit,... they're only worried about how they can increase the money making periods ten folds by slowly giving us access to worthwhile technology every now and then... so as a result we simply give in and buy the newer version of their mobiles. How sad we are.
If you're just visiting Chapel Hill for some reason, look first at going to Crook's Corner for shrimp & grits. You'll be glad you did.
Squid's is also a good call. If you do that, leave room for the key lime pie.
Top of the Hill isn't in the top 10.
FUNKYDEREK has it right:
"The site was obviously designed to impress the restaurant owners, not to be accessible to the greatest number of people."
...and it's a classic usability mistake. Sure, it's true that if the iPhone supported Flash then this might not have been an issue. But it's almost always a mistake to cut out a portion of your audience just so you can feature some swanky animations that do nothing but "set the mood".
Don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to using Flash and other technologies to support and enhance branding. But the website creator(s) should have been thinking through how the site would be used in the real world. Not everyone has or wants Flash. Likewise, why display a menu in PDF format if you could instead display it in HTML so -everyone- can see it - then offer a separate PDF link for those who want to download a copy?
Flash sucks. And I'm not really sold on the whole "web 2.0" ect thing either. I prefer good old html, with the occasional javascripted rollover button. Also, get off my lawn.
#52
"is it not safe for a restaruanteur to concentrate on creating and serving good food to the people brave enough to actually set foot to pavement and walk by?"
Marketing is part of running a successful business. Maintaining a functional website is cost-effective marketing.
#11 POSTED BY JONATHAN_V , MARCH 20, 2009 1:23 PM
You are correct... if they get a shitty developer, that is. I've personally seen the bottom line fly up for restaurants that get a good dev, great photos of the food and proper SEO for the business.
I've personally made some half-ass sites that made the restaurants make so much more profit that they were able to change the pay structure for all the employees (pay them in much closer intervals) because the cash flow jumped up so much higher.
And, yes... you can see the menus with an iphone, etc.
I still think it's lame the iphone doesn't support Flash yet. I understand why people hate Flash, but let's get real... a large part of the web has it because it so easy to dev multimedia with it. I'll be glad when Flash dies to open standards in the future... but, for now... Flash is a reality on the web (used for good and evil design) and if Apple is to truly claim that the iphone has a "real" web browser.... it needs to support Flash no matter how shitty someone develops with it.
True true! Any restaurant opting for a website should do the following:
1. scan your takeaway pamphlet and put it as image (or convert it to text) on a static html page. All on one page, no menus. If you have VERY much info then the range of foods you offer is probably overloaded and should be limited.
2. Stick to (1) for a few months and complicate things if and only if you are VERY certain that more is needed and requested by the customers.
Wait, you clicked a link on their website and it made your phone travel back in time?
AWESOME!
In Chicago, we have a great place called CW Napkin. Fantastic take out, yummy grease.
http://www.cwnapkin.com/
Their website used the eye-gouging "comic sans" but it's dead simple, has pictures of the food when you click on it and scales to mobile easily. Probably done by someone's kid for some free pizza, but it works.
The restaurant is a little business working with limited resources. I have an iPhone and Apple's the bigger offender with its protectionist stand against Flash support.
If it's a decent restaurant, you'll go there despite their inability to play well with your phone. If that's enough to send you packing, the place is probably better off without your churlish presence.
Hey, Dan. I think the comments here with travel advice reflect what I've learned about finding places to eat/stay/visit: there's no substitute for on-the-ground, local experience (followed closely by the voice of the community that's previously visited a spot, filtered by your understanding of the perspective of the people making the recommendations); the website design issues are a second-order issue. So where's our crowdsourced restaurant menu system? http://www.wikimenus.com/ is the obvious URL, but that one seems to be Santa Barbara, CA-focused with a bad case of wikispam.
Of perhaps greater community interest, from the screenshots: iPhone on T-Mobile?
You have an iPhone and you're not using the UrbanSpoon app? wow!
It's free and pretty good.
This is a big pet peve of mine too! I just built a site for a restaurant based on Wordpress and I used the handy iwphone plugin to make it even more iphone friendly. I also used a couple of plugins that will automatically update twitter with new content on the site (specials and event announcements) and display a photo of the daily special on the front page sidebar. And I created a facebook page that is auto updated with the sites RSS feed. The owner loves it, especially since he can keep it all updated with the wordpress app on his iphone. I do all this stuff only occasionally on as side work (I was paid in gift certificates), but I bet making friendly websites like this for businesses based on Wordpress could be a nice little business for someone. The site I did is http://theroyale.com if you're curious.
I had a similar problem trying to find a hotel in Minneapolis.
When I complained to Chipotle, at least 5 years ago, about their non-intuitive flash site that required one to move the mouse around some object in the center of the screen, so that it would eventually pop up a button that you could click on to find the location of their restaurants, I just got a brush off. I even suggested that their web page was unusable to people with visual disabilities, too. Their web page is still unusable for people who have disabled flash and javascript, and I presume, people with visual disabilities and most mobile phone users. I don't care if you want to present some sort branding with a whimsical website with funky background music, that's not why I go to your restaraunt's website. Ever.
Best restaurant website I've seen so far:
"Sorry, our website isn't finished yet. In the meantime, go to menupages.com and search for [name of restaurant]."
My not-very-good phone (Motorola L6, free a couple of years ago) has a crap browser, but it's usable for emergencies -- most often when I've got to the destination street, but can't remember the building number.
That is, unless the website has images or flash. Opera Mini can cope with the images, but it takes about three minutes to load, but there's no getting past the flash.
Flash is one of the two worst things to ever happen to the web (the other being internet explorer). It violates the very idea of an open, inter-linked web experience.
I'd like to hear more about how no-flash-on-phones is a corporate strategy to 'sheep-ify' us and hold us back.
I'm debating switching my graphic design website over to flash just for looks and mobile viewing is definitely an issue. But frankly, I don't know if I want my portfolio to be viewable on mobile devices anyway.
I wish there was a way to combat that, but allow for Google indexing - which is frankly, my biggest pro for sticking to HTML.
It's not just an issue with mobile phones.
One of the reasons I haven't gone all-Linux on my old G4 Mac is because Adobe has not released a Flash plugin for PowerPC Linux, rendering many web sites just plain inaccessible.
I was trying to get the contact info for a contemporary art gallery while walking in the street looking for it, and it was hidden behind a missing flash app. Seriously, address and phone number no where to be found in the text.
FYI: Top of the Hill sells more alcohol (beer, wine and liquor) than any other restaurant/bar in the state. They'll make it with or without iPhone junkies who have forgotten how to use any other form of media.
Several of you asked about the T-Mobile carrier issue. Yes, I use an unlocked and jailbroken phone when I'm using this one (I use three different phones, all GSM, for various purposes: iPhone, G1 and Nokia N95).
Hat tip to the good folks at iPhone Dev Team for the jailbreak/unlock help.
You know, on second thought, if they really wanted to comply with basic web usability standards regarding users with disabilities, their sites would always have simplified, likely phone friendly HTML, anyway, without taking extra care to consider mobile, and making that easy when they decide they can do that as well, and they can just even have the entire menu as one run on sentence, and I hope it is read out to me by a very sexy human robot voice, like my new phone has on it!!!
The only place you need to be sure to go is Mama Dip's!:
http://www.mamadips.com/
Oh Jesus at least get video footage of him blinking.
i blame apple for still not supporting flash on iphones. i mean it is not like every 2nd person has one these days..
Try Panzanella restaurant just a couple of miles down the road in Carrboro. I promise our website will load; we've been using the same basic template for a decade. Yay HTML 4.0 Transitional!
http://www.panzanella.coop
There are way cooler restaurants you could be going to in North Carolina than that one.
@ #50 posted by HeruRaHa
Thank you for saying what I wanted to say, except about 10 times funnier.
As someone who lived there, I've got to put my vote in for Elaine's as some of the best food I've had (and I've been to a lot of different restaurants!). It's truly a gem.
The chef Bret is awesome... a nice guy, but passionate about food and creating great-tasting innovative dishes.
It's about quality, not quantity, so you might want to hit a good BBQ place for lunch, and then this place for dinner.
http://www.elainesonfranklin.com/
23 @22: "Other generally OK sites always have PDF menus for some reason."
Oddly enough, some guy came into my work tonight (I work at a little pizza place) and wanted to design us a website. I didn't listen to most of what he was saying, but one thing I heard was "and we can make the menu a PDF file so customers can download and print it out at home! Plus when you need to change the menu it's a piece of cake to edit the file!"
After he left, I told the owner that I personally hate PDF file menus and that it's really not worth the time. I know my parents can't figure out how to download a reader, and trying to require people to download a program, then a file, just to find out what's on the menu seems asinine.
Usability Fail
heruraha wins
@ChrisGiarmo, Flash haters generally:
People like the movement, energy and interactivity that flash can bring to a site, and that is not wholly without merit, IMO.
But everyone is absolutely right that requiring Flash to experience the site is a design failure.
Luckily, that is not the only choice. Just develop using flash sparingly and effectively, and always have plain HTML content to provide equivalent functionality and useability if flash or javascript is unavailable.
swfobject is my favourite way to do this. You just end up with plain, well formed html pages, and if javascript and flash are running you get flash as an enhancement. No one needs to get hurt.
For God's sake don't build a flash only site. Seriously.
I have nothing to contribute, as I rarely eat out, don't live in the area, and have never used this level of technology to forage for food. However, I was curious about what the tiny cube-shaped thing was supposed to be, so I read some of the comments.
I concur with several people re: #50 (Heruraha). Very funny!
AND, I APRECHE-ate how #25 (Apreche) managed to work so many food-related idioms into the comment. Did anyone else catch that?
My votes follow those hailing Crook's Corner, Jujube, and the Barbeque Joint.
I think Elaine's is overrated for shi-shi. On the cheap, check out Neal's Deli in Carrboro, as well.
At least you know they have beer.
Maybe they just don't want your kind there!
You technology-using bailout-voting equal-rights-promoting YANKEE!
interestingly, as an iphone user you're now in the same boat as blind/visually impaired users trying to get information via screenreaders...maybe NOW site owners will realise that there's a better way to do things?
I should probably add that it's entirely possible to get good Google results on a Flash-heavy site, and make mobile users happy. Embed your Flash with SWFObject, provide alternative content (even just a phone number!) and you'll please a ton of people.
I have two clients in my local area with Flash-heavy sites that are #1 and #2 on a typical Google search.
Oh lord, what did we ever do before cellphones?
I actually do understand the pdf menu... in a lot of cases, it's literally a scan of the paper menu, and pdfs are smaller than giant pics.
That doesn't excuse cellphone browsers from not running flash, nor sites that use flash for navigation. Flashnav breaks the web - can't link to pages within the site, can't use back button, etc.
Magnolia Grill is near in Durham on 9th Street. Nationally ranked. For a 1950's style grill with modern style wait staff from this century try Elmo's Diner (breakfast all day, best milk shake you ever had, lot's of food variety). Crook's Corner is at the end of Franklin Street, almost in Chapel Hill.
I could hardly care less if a web page displays correctly on an iphone, but a surprising number of restaurants still have no web page at all!
As a restaurant owner, I have to say it's harder than you'd think to get a good website. Web designers, in my experience, often want to add lots of bells and whistles that you don't need and that run up the loading time. I'd like to believe that these aren't terrible, awful, untalented people. I think they're just used to showing flash to clients and they want to impress you. Also, I get the feeling that web designers get bored easily and want to play with new techno toys.
We were lucky enough to find a designer who wanted to execute something simple, but it took several meetings and a lot of hair-pulling to get it as simple as we wanted it. Basically we're using a Word Press template for the site, and it's been terrific so far.
http://www.dirtcandynyc.com/
(Full disclosure: my wife is the chef and owner, I'm just the guy who deals with the technical details.)
There's really no excuse for omitting alternate content on websites. In this day and age, it has simply become too simple to be overlooked. As was previously mentioned, use SWFObject. That having been said: "Physician heal thyself BOING BOING." I'm tired of seeing that little blue lego with a question mark while reading boing boing on my iPhone. So why don't you guys provide alternate links for YouTube and Vimeo on your own pages.
Don't eat at Top of the Hill! If you want good food and an *awesome* beer selection, try Milltown in Carrboro. Also worth checking out: Lantern, Margaret's Cantina, Allen & Son Barbecue or Neal's Deli for cheap food, and Queen of Sheba for authentic Ethiopian cuisine, if you can stand the lousy service (try their coffee with butter in it! mmm).
So many good restaurants to check out here, just ask us locals!
Wait, why not call them up and ask what's on the menu? You were on an iPHONE, correct?
Lantern, Lantern, Lantern. Seriously go to Lantern. Ask to go in the back and eat in the bar.
Idea for a reality tv show: a Gordon Ramsay styled web guru "helping" web designers:
"This site is absolute SH*T! Look, I can't even read it on my PHONE. Do you think I might want, just MAYBE, if I were hungry and driving around in me car, to look up a restaurant on my PHONE? You complete TWIT? Look, that's just full of flash, alright? How the F*CK am I going to read that on my iPhone? What you need is simple, local, easy to understand HTML, right?"
In the British version he just revamps the site with HTML and maybe sets up a WP blog. In the USA version he sets up the restaurant with dedicated, redundant servers and web development for a year.
I smell a hit!
works fine on my nokia as well, and i'm in ireland. maybe we have better cables running to that website or something. my phones 2 years old though, maybe it's a legacy thing, could your iphone be too new? i'm always wary of new fangled technology, i still haven't got round to fitting my sheepdogs with those robot dog exo-skeletons that everyone else here is getting. hey ho, more time in the fields i say.
dan
Whatever you do, avoid Top of The Hill, and Squids. Lantern is awesome, so is Milltown. Elane's on Franklin is a favorite, as is Acme in Carrboro. If you make it to SW Durham, check out City Beverage. Downtown Durham, check out Brightleaf square (lots to eat there) or the American Tobacco Campus (good food there too).
LOL! Gordon Ramsay. Awesome.
How rude of them to tease you with the "BEER" link, only to not have it provide any actual info. Great. Now I'm annoyed AND thirsty.
The Allen and Son out 15-501 S somehow has way better hush puppies than the one on 86. The Barbecue Joint is good, and may appeal more to out-of-towners since it's sort of highbrow. Crooks is probably my favorite place to eat, and in my opinion one of the last landmark restaurants still up and running. Milltown doesn't do much for me, but everyone else seems to like it. You have to really love Belgian beer to like that place, I think. Get a chicken biscuit at Time Out if you're out late, or one at Sunrise if you're up early. If you just need something to eat, and aren't trying to play tourist, I like Carrburritos, Pepper's Pizza, and Mediterranean Deli.
I generally avoid eating at places with a slick websites. Forget the mobile web, ask the locals.
Well, this just shows how ridiculously out of date these businesses are in general, because every business should be approaching a mobile presence for more customers, duh... It would be much easier for all of us trust me.
Anonymous @101: "Wait, why not call them up and ask what's on the menu? You were on an iPHONE, correct?"
If you call up a restaurant and ask "What's on your menu?" and expect anything more than a brief description of the type of food (italian, thai, home-style), then the employees there will hate you. They usually have better things to do than read the menu to some jackass on the phone. But if you could read their menu online, it would let you see what they have, not inconvenience the employees/tie up the phone, and would let you decide if you want to eat there without having to drive to the place to read the menu in person.
I can't believe people can defend such a poor business practise.
It's not a matter of putting down the phone and walking around, or a matter of calling rather than using the website. If they put up a site that is blank/useless on a popular browser it will not help their business. It makes them look sloppy. A simple site would even be cheaper than the flash site we can't read.
To those who choose to browse with their phone rather than their feet, the website is as important as the storefront. If your storefront looks like crap and doesn't give any information about what is inside, it doesn't matter how good the food is.
Disappointing website aside, Top of the Hill has the second best hamburger I've had in my life, beating out Father's Office in LA and second only to the Riverside Lunch in Charlottesville, VA.
Get 'em the old fashioned way. Ask around.
Don't bother with Top of the Hill. IMHO, it's Chili's level food. Edible, but that's about it. Great atmosphere, though. Fun place to grab a few beers after work. However, Carolina Brewery usually has better beer.
Try out Spanky's across the street, great burgers and a pretty good reuben.
Or, go west on Franklin a bit and try out the Mediterranean Deli. Simply fantastic. Show up really hungry and get the gyros & hummus platter or the lamb kabobs. Just get there early for the lamb; they usually run out quick.
BBQ Joint is OK if you like Carolina BBQ. Allen & Son's is maybe a little better. I do not Carolina BBQ, however, and highly recommend the Q-Shack nearby in Durham. It's Texas-style. Vastly superior.
The Weathervane in Southern Season in University Mall is pretty good too. Fried green tomato BLT and basil tomato soup is an experience.
I saw above somebody suggested Margaret's. Great place, just don't go there expecting Tex-Mex. They serve a quesadilla with feta on it. Feta. It's actually pretty good, just not right.
If you go there, also check out Cup of Joe in the same shopping center; best coffee in the area IMO. Helps that it's a two minute walk from my house.
PROTIP: If you drink iced tea and don't like supersaturated sugar solutions, ask for "unsweet tea." The default around here is true southern-style, diabetes-inducing sweet tea.
@mgfarrelly, 61:
Ooh, that CW Napkin site is excellent. Sure, it looks like something out of the 90s. But it made me quite hungry - shame I'm on the wrong continent.
Yes, life is so incredibly inconvenient for the privileged. God forbid that the world doesn't bend over backwards for us exalted iPhone owners.
Totally off topic, but can BoingBoing keep Dan Gillmor as at least a semi-permanent blogger? I've generally enjoyed the guest blogging run but his have really stood out.
What a spoiled generation this is everything must
always be instantly available ,maybe they will have
a program to tell you when you will die.
You could have called this restaurant and asked
about the menu.But I know that was to personal a
thing to do. Stay anxious!
I am shocked - shocked, I say! - that no one has mentioned Locopops yet. Fabulous gourmet popsicles in unexpected yet fabulous flavors. And only $2! The original location is in Durham, but I think they have one in Chapel Hill now, too.
Digital Artz: Allow me to repeat myself; if you call a restaurant to ask about the menu, and it's not a specific question with the menu in front of you, they will hate you. Don't expect your food to be very good that night.
Seriously try the Mediterranean Deli down the street for actual bliss. I want to be buried under it when I die, so that I can be close to it.
I feel that the iphone is powerful, but not so powerful that it can handle all the FLASH CS parameters that a desktop or laptop computer can handle. IF Adobe and Apple actually worked on a mobile friendly version of Flash, that web developers could export out for their websites, that would alleviate alot of problems with flash not being accessible for the iphone.
Or I could be totally wrong. It could be that Apple does not want us to access Flash multimedia on the iphone, even though the tiny hardware might be able to handle the processing power. It handles mpg4's fairly well, so maybe it canhandle that Flash plugin.
Maybe Apple just wants to nickel and dime us out of every red cent over the next 10 years of iphone releases.
Where are my rocket boots the future was supposed to deliver?
-Jeff from StudioCreations
Here's why I go to a restaurant's web site:
• To get their address (and maybe phone number, if I'm calling in an order to pick up)
• To take a look at their menu and prices
Anything else is superfluous and unnecessary.
A web site is communication. It should express your style. Regardless of what an individual thinks, lots of people use their phones to view the web at work, out of town, and in traffic. If you can't communicate with these people effectively, don't blame Apple, or the hungry people, blame yourself. It is money our of your pocket. People will just find another place with a friendlier web site. Duh.