Smart Alice's Web Design Blog

Internet users are more and more sophisticated these days and aren’t granting businesses any slack when the web site is less than professional. The Boston Globe article When Bad Web Sites Happen to Good Restaurants highlights common complaints people make about restaurant web sites. Those complaints apply to all web sites so I’ve made a checklist.

Common Complaints

• Flashy animation is annoying because it wastes time downloading and can freeze a computer with low memory
• Out of date information earns scorn and derision
• Background music, especially droning techno
• Difficult to find information, such as location and phone number
• Stock photography, people recognize and don’t respect it.
• Amateur photos, amateur photos are characterized by one or more of the following:
  • pixilation – caused by not knowing how to size a photo for the web
  • blurry image – caused by a shaking camera or using a low resolution photo from a cell phone
  • bleached out or murky images – caused by not knowing how to properly light a photograph
  • poor composition (distracting backgrounds, for example)

An Annoying Restaurant Web Site

I’m sure the food at Firefly’s Bar-B-Q is great, but their web site is annoying.

• The splash screen makes for an extra click to get to the information. And the flying insect animation seems juvenile.
• Even though the looping music on the home page has a good beat, I can’t stand listening to it over and over and it’s driving me crazy when I click between this page and other pages, or leave the home page open in the browser.
• Confusing navigation. One menu with drop down sub menus would be easier to follow.

I’m Looking for a Good Restaurant Web Site

I wanted to post an example of a good restaurant web site. After looking for over an hour, I’m going to give up for now. I’ll keep looking and when I find one I’ll post it. In the meantime it’s curious why all the restaurant web sites I looked at are so bad. I believe the core reason is the restaurant business is a tough one. An independent restaurant doesn’t make a huge profit so they might skimp on spending a lot on a web site.

A Better Web Site for a Small Business is Possible

The challenges for any small business that wants a web site are the cost, keeping up with changing trends, and updating information quickly. A good web designer can help you by building your site in affordable stages and guiding you towards results that are professional and usable.

Analysis by Smart Alice Web Design, smart web design for businesses who want a unique and effective presence on the internet.

Copyright 2011, Alice Gebura, All Rights Reserved.

A web site is built with a bunch of code that a browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox can translate into pictures and text to display on a computer.  HTML and CSS are the basic languages that accomplish this.  Other programming tools let you build slide shows, interactive forms, and so forth. One of the tools you can use to build an entire web site or parts of it is Adobe Flash. Flash is basically an animation program. Here are two examples of Flash built web sites:

Vegaone (notice all the clicks before you actually see content, and the wait time to see the content)

InfinitiColors (beautiful design, but, man, this is annoying to navigate)

A Flash based web site built by a creative and competent programmer is a thing of beauty. But it’s very time consuming to build and thus very expensive. If you’re an independent consultant, artist, or small business owner, think twice before you sign up for a Flash web site. The expense should deter you, but there are things to be aware of that are just as critical as the expense.

Poor Search
Flash files aren’t read by search programs so your content is not being indexed by Google, Yahoo, etc. This means people won’t find you when they search for you.

Hard to Update

You want your web site to inform your clients, customers, fans, etc. which means your web site must be as current as possible. To have a current web site you need to be able to update it quickly.  Updating a Flash web site is much more complicated, time consuming, and expensive than editing a regular web site file.  That’s enough for me to say forget about it.  But there’s more.

Not User Friendly

People respond well when their needs are served and respond badly when they feel ill treated.  I’ve heard so many complaints from people about Flash web sites.  They dislike waiting passively while the animation runs.  They don’t like the visual annoyance of distracting animation. Why isn’t the message getting back to the designers and builders?

No Future

Read Al Morel’s blog post  The Future of Flash. He predicts Flash will be gone in five years, and explains why.  Flash doesn’t translate well on mobile devices, it uses up computing resources and slows things down.

When it comes to Flash my advice is don’t do it!  Smashing Magazine writes in depth about your options for creating a rich web site experience without Flash in its post The Gradual Disappearance of Flash.

Analysis by Smart Alice Web Design, smart web design for businesses who want a unique and effective presence on the internet.

Copyright 2011, Alice Gebura, All Rights Reserved.