Effective online menus for restaurants
Ever noticed how most restaurant websites link to PDFs of their menu?
As a potential customer, I really don’t want to have to download and open the menu of five or six different restaurants to figure out where I want to eat.
At the same time, the restaurant owners want me to be able to see the menu right away, so the butter-dipped lobster tail catches my eye. The more potential customers that see the menu, the better.
Imagine if those restaurants used embedit.in to display PDFs of their menus on the website. The menu shows up right in the page, tempting me with the caramel-apple cheesecake. Restaurants retain the flexibility to change the embed as often as they would like. It’s a win-win for everyone.
As an example, here’s the dinner menu for the Palo Alto cajun spot Nola, sized to fit the Increo on Ideas blog:
Vitaly Golomb Said,
February 20, 2009 @ 11:51 am
Actually most restaurants are not savvy with desktop publishing (or web content management). So what they will do is PDF the monthly/weekly/daily images of their menus and simply link them on their site vs. reentering all the information twice in two different mediums. From the perspective of marketing (and customer conversion), I would say that most people don’t make their decisions on restaurant of choice for the evening based on the small menu changes week to week. You can validate this by looking at the site of the top Zagat rated restaurants and seeing how little emphasis they put on the “menu”. Most times they will have general descriptions of typical dishes, etc.
Just another perspective.
Hi from SVII,
Vitaly
Kimber Lockhart Said,
February 23, 2009 @ 3:28 pm
Vitaly,
Absolutely, and that’s why embedit.in is so cool. Instead of having to make all the changes twice (as HTML menus require), restaurateurs can update a PDF and then embed that PDF in their website (as easy as linking to a PDF). All the benefits of in-page viewing without the hassle.
Certainly customers don’t make decisions based on week to week changes, but they do make decisions based on whether they can quickly look over the menu of a new place to get a feel for its cuisine. A download barrier in front of that menu seems inconvenient and unnecessary.
Perhaps there are restaurants out there that don’t want customers to see the menu prior to visiting, but I’m not sure that’s a positive sign!