At Your Service

A Comprehensive Review ofTen Restaurant Websites

All of the restaurants whose sites we reviewed

all have physical presence in Georgia, if not within the City of Atlanta.

So what difference does a website make?

A good website reflects the atmosphere and perceptions

of the restaurant.

Good websites for restaurantsallow people to see the menu,

order food, or place reservations.

Most importantly, it should makepeople want to eat there.

McDonald’s

Krystal

Pizza Hut

Fellini’s Pizza

Umezono

The Real Chow Baby

Pappadeaux

The Old Spaghetti Factory

The Sun Dial

Maggiano’s

Interactivity Through Flash

• Many of the sites we saw used Adobe Flash as a common platform to give their sites more interactivity and flexibility in their design.

• Most modern browsers have Flash capability (but not all older browsers)

• Also, most mobile browsers can’t handle Flash, making them unusable.

Everyone Loves Pictures

• Pictures of the restaurant and food provide information (such as making the restaurant easier to find / spot)

• Pictures also anchor various design elements of the site

• … Only certain pictures work, though. The pictures need to be not only “professional”, but relevant.

The .com Convention

• The URL of a website is how people find the site.

• If people can’t type / remember the URL, then the site is useless (because nobody sees it!)

• Having an unusual TLD (like umezono.us) is much harder to remember than a similar .com

Bells & Whistles

• We found a correlation between the darkness of the reds on the site and the “prestige” of the restaurant.

• Sites with more multimedia content were more fun (and we spent more time on them!)

• After a while, however, the noise from various sites just became annoying.