A mobile friendly website for restaurants that doesn’t have any of my pet peeves.
On Friday I received a press release from GoDaddy about how its website builder had new functionality and specific templates for restaurants.
It was Friday afternoon and I generally don’t care much about small business website builders. The combination of these two led me to click the “delete” button. But then I quickly hit “undo”.
Wait? Did that say specialized websites for restaurants? Did it also mention mobile?
You see, one thing that annoys me to no end is restaurant websites. As a whole, they are horrible.
The key problem is that they aren’t design for mobile. Yet restaurant websites are the one category I primarily browse from a mobile device. You know the experience — you’re out somewhere, want to get something to eat, and start looking for something online. Or you know where you want to eat but would like to call ahead to get your name on the waitlist.
So you search for the restaurant’s website. It comes up.
Then you try to click the phone number on the site to call the restaurant and it doesn’t work. You tap your finger several times before you realize they made the phone number a graphic rather than text, so the phone doesn’t recognize that it’s a phone number. You then have to remember the number, switch to your dialer, and type it in.
Or you find an interesting restaurant in the area and want to see the menu. You click the menu link…and it’s a PDF.
Yes, a PDF. I’d bet 9 our of 10 restaurants have a pdf for their online menu. That’s very annoying when you’re on a mobile device.
OK, now back to the GoDaddy product. I figured I’d check it out and see if it “solved” the problem of restaurant web pages.
The example GoDaddy provided in its press release is Malee’s Thai Bistro in Scottsdale. I visited the site from my Droid, and the screenshot in this post is what I saw.
It was darn near perfect. A button to call. A button to pull up the map. A button to view the menu…and it’s not a PDF. (The menu’s are actually managed by a third party service that let’s restaurants update them easily.)
The site was mobile optimized. A quick scroll and you can see the hours.
The only thing missing was a link to OpenTable to make a reservation, although I don’t know if Malee’s uses OpenTable.
I’m not going to opine on the desktop version. But from a mobile standpoint, I love it.
I’m sure there are other good website builders for restaurants. In fact, if you search for Malee’s you’ll find a website that I assume is an older one they created with another company. It’s not bad, either.
Regardless of which builder a restaurant uses, I wish more would get on the bandwagon.
Holly says
Hi Andrew,
Enjoyed your article! We share your views about the importance of a mobile-optimized website for restaurants. We created http://www.flavorplate.com for that very reason. It’s a simple, affordable, responsive and hosted website solution specifically for this audience–the food-savvy, not the tech savvy. It’s not a combination of services bundled to achieve a solution, it’s all-in-one. We’d love to hear your thoughts. Cheers!
Sam says
Looks great its what every restaurant needs there are so many restaurant sites i cant stand to use because they are not user freindly there are a few companys offering this feature now!
Vince says
The problem with the GoDaddy solution is they run ads on your site. And that is also the case with the mobile site for the Malee Thai Bistro.
It looks unprofessional and sloppy to have banner ads across the mobile site. They are right at the top too.
The idea of creating a mobile site for a restaurant is the right one. This service from GoDaddy, however, is not the right solution.
We have a new mobile website builder coming out in 1 week at: http://mobi5D.com
It a better solution, more options and features, and add free.
Raj says
Vince, would you be kind enough to let me know what ads you are seeing with GoDaddy site – will love to get your insights on that:
Please check out: http://maleesonmain.com/ and let us know. As always, we love feedback from everyone.
RajM
from GoDaddy
Andrew Allemann says
I think Vince is looking at MaleesThaiBistro.com, which I guess is the restaurant’s old site. It appears to use a service called mobistro when you visit from a mobile device.
James Bladel says
This is a peeve of mine as well, and apparently one shared by The Oatmeal:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/restaurant_website
Andrew Allemann says
@ James Bladel – that’s funny.
Now if we could just get big web sites to stop pushing their app when you visit them from a phone or iPad…
Dotology says
Spot on, Andrew. It’s the bain of every foodie’s existence. But ultimately there is still a huge disconnect between the restaurant and their web presence. I see this all the time – the restaurateur or GM just doesn’t update their website – no matter how simple it is. Hopefully this will be less of a problem as the space matures.