Yeah, setting up a website is a pain.
But in reality there’s only a handful of things people care about for your restaurant: what, when, and where. Put up your menu, put up your hours, and put up your location. And a phone number.
Yeah, setting up a website is a pain.
But in reality there’s only a handful of things people care about for your restaurant: what, when, and where. Put up your menu, put up your hours, and put up your location. And a phone number.
I specifically tracked this problem and built https://lleu.site to try and get businesses in my city off of social media.
Built a menu editor. Has a built in blog and image galleries. Events calendar and event posts. Has a single page simple mode and multi page editor. Contact form with message intake and forwarding. Easy UI that I don’t change underfoot every quarter so its consistent. Works on mobile and low powered devices as well.
Kept the monthly price low and I’ve done cold emails, mailers, newspaper ads, online ads.
Still barely any takers. Probably a bit of a branding thing. Maybe its something else.
"lleu.site" might not be the clearest in regards to what the service offers. It reads too nerd. Something like "easyweb.site" or "yourown.site" might better describe it.
Thanks. I am definitely injecting too much nerd. I just couldn't help myself. I do have alternate urls available but point taken. I should probably redo the branding.
My first reaction was that it was visually intimidating for a non-computer person. I went through the workflow of the demo and it was pretty easy, but I suspect most people wouldn't make it that far.
Appreciate the feedback. Would you mind highlighting anything in particular? I can take it. My main efforts went into the platform. I admittedly stumbled through the landing pages. Wasn’t sure how far to take it. Most of my designs end up rather simple but I was concerned it wouldn’t attract people. Its terrible if its having the opposite effect lol
Clutter.
Restaurants generally have low margins. What brand recognition do social media platforms have with an average person? How much does it cost a restaurant to list themselves on social media? That's your competition, widely-known and free.
You'd probably have better luck if you gave them an actual dotcom address, and you managed all of their online presence for them (Google Maps, Facebook, Instagram, etc.). But even then it's hard to compete with free, especially when your prospective customers are stingy.
Edit: I suppose you're also competing with Uber Eats. You can already see menus there, whether you want delivery or not.
IMO the four designs that I saw as examples are not attractive enough. Especially coming from the editor's builder, they should make a stronger showcase.
The examples look fine to me.
Potential customers want to see the menu (or product range or similar), location, a couple of pictures. It's supposed to give useful and necessary information. The intended purpose is:
Before: your cafe does not have a website.
After: your cafe has a simple website where people can see the menu, hours, and location.
This tool accomplishes that, and looks fine.
It's not supposed to give the viewer an aesthetic experience so novel and surprising, subverting the entire paradigm of cafe menus, to leave the viewer questioning reality and rethinking their entire approach to life.
Why use this tool that looks vibe coded when you can also use wix (which sadly also looks vibe coded nowadays)?
I appreciate everyone’s feedback, but it wasn’t “vibe-coded”. I’ve been in software over ten years and am targeting non-technical users.
I’m aiming for a mix of dazzle and simplicity.
Wix is at least $10 more per month. The intention is to keep the price low without making it impossible to afford to operate on a smaller scale.
Many small businesses have nothing approaching what tech businesses consider a low budget.
If your product works as described, I think it would be great for a lot of small businesses. The only problem is that your potential customers don't know about it, and there's no easy way to discover it.
I noticed users in the United States can't sign up. ("United States" is not in the list of countries in the required Country field, and it's also excluded from "18. Regional Service" is the Terms of Service.) Is that intentional? It could be part of the reason for the slow uptake.
Yes, my primary concern is serving the Canadian market at present.
I wouldn't have the highest confidence in the results if I open up the homepage and my fans rev up tbh.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. I’ve tested it personally out on some real clunkers. Maybe the animations on the landing page don’t play nice with every browser… Hard to know without more details, but I guess I appreciate you checking it out either way.
Yes, it's the animations. They're very intensive in general but especially the ones that AI-generated sites like to use to get around the basic attempts to block them. I was admittedly a bit hostile because the frequency, intensity, and hiddenness of animations is becoming an increasing aggravation across the web, and more and more frequently they're disregarding my OS/browser settings to disable animations.
It doesn't look like they're "trying to say" anything. They said it.
They opened the homepage and heard and/or felt their fans rev up, which didn't leave a good impression. They don't have confidence that your product/service is worth paying for (perhaps not worth using even if it were free).
There's nothing else to figure out.
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People put that stuff up on Google maps, Facebook, and Instagram now.
I know it’s not popular with the crowd here, but those platforms are free, easy to use, and where the customers are. The mainstream options for a website like squarespace are absurdly expensive.
Yes and no. I find the restaurant on Google maps but 9/10 times the menu is either outdated or not properly structured and having a link to the menu website is better. So Google maps is the top of the funnel but I still appreciate a website.
For many local places here, the only way to get the menu online is if a customer posted a photo of the menu on Google maps or something.
And 1/3 of the time, that photo is too blurry and off-angle and whatnot to even read properly.
I can’t help but think what this means is just that the menu isn’t that’s important as a marketing tool. If having an up to date website and menu resulted in a noticeable boost in business, every restaurant would have it.
Average person either finds the place through google maps or a TikTok video, checks a few photos of the food or venue, then goes. Doesn’t matter what the exact menu is because there are plenty of options and something will be appealing.
Or it’s good for customers and bad for restaurants. There are such things, and menu can be easily one. Especially tourist focused restaurants infested with such tactics, and you can avoid most of them just looking on their menu.
Maybe that is the case for some places, but this is rather rural Germany. Not sure when I've last seen a tourist here.
Yeah that context matters significantly. What’s the turnover rate for restaurants in your area? What’s the variance in menu? “Success” in my neck of the woods is staying open more than 2 years, and menu availability plays a significant role.
We usually order by phone, then drive by and pick up the food. Can't do that w/o a menu. The solution is usually to take a printed menu with you when you're there. But that's a chicken-and-egg problem!
Is that a "restaurant" then? Your use case means a kitchen which indeed needs a menu. But dining is something else, so we cannot compare.
Many of them offer that option, so there is a grey zone. But you're right - should have been more clear about that.
I think it's important for customers and they usuallly post the menu in google maps thing, basically the customers are doing the labor of the business owner and the business owner as he still gets the results he doesn't do it
You are moving the goalposts, subtly.
The conversational context did not involve anyone making any claims about the viability of businesses operating sans info. You can check—nowhere does the person who you're responding to (or any of the ancestor comments in this thread) write in their comment that companies are losing business because of the lack of up-to-date information, whether on their own site on through Google Maps.
The context is people, very reasonably, making a plea that that info be published on the open web.
What makes you think that the menu in the website is not going to be outdated.
I think the parent is making the assumption that a business owner would be able (and willing) to update the menu on their own website, whereas random pictures on Google Maps/Instagram might not have the most recent menu.
Really the previous comment should have mentioned Yelp, and perhaps Tripadvisor for non-American customers.
Google maps makes sense at least, but you're straight losing money if all you have is an instagram page. I can't tell if the facebook mention is a joke or not.
Menus change ie seasonal, and there is a daily changing handwritten chalkboard: Make a photo, put it on IG. Hours change: This week only opened from 8 instead 7: Post it on IG. Who has the time to answer a phonecall? And who uses phone numbers these days anyway? Text me on whatsapp like everyone else does. Disclaimer: Don‘t use IG. But if I want to know if our favourite pizza place is open (cook travels to football games a lot), I ask my wife to check on Insta.
It's a trend in Sri Lanka for some reason to put your menu on Instagram... as a reel. Because you don't want your customers to have more than 15 seconds to view what you serve.
IG is only for the regular customers.
Not really. I don't have an IG account, but when picking a place ein an area I don't know, it is the place to get an impression of the place. The visual part tells a lot about the place, while many websites maybe got a photo from the outside, if at all.
How do you even know that a restaurant exists in an area you don't know? Not through Instagram, but through a web search or Google Maps.
But you're right, having a ton of good images on your website is one of the most important things for restaurants and most other businesses. And most fail in this aspect.
Google maps works the same way, thats the default in most of the world. I don't even know anyone who has IG account, myself including. Everybody has google account, not that you need one to browse (more or less) categorized photos on maps.
Most people should put in a Google maps entry
Your menu? Can't. Your open hours? They already know it.
You can put your menu on Google maps, we did it for our restaurant. https://maps.app.goo.gl/YdbSHd7hewkXQeMz8 see "menu" tab
To be fair the Google maps restaurant side of the operation is quite possibly the largest ratio I've ever seen between "amount of capital and engineering skill available" and "quality (lack thereof) of UX." You have to access your restaurant profile through the Google search portal. It's a nightmare.
I followed the links and got www.thejispot.com’s server IP address could not be found.
Yes, we used to have a website: https://github.com/508-dev/thejispot
The restaurant is closed now, permanently.
You can see we updated it fairly regularly https://github.com/508-dev/thejispot/commits/main/
That's one way to do it. The links are broken though.
The words you're looking for are, "Oh! My mistake. Sorry." Or, "Thanks! I stand corrected."
Yeah, you could even just serve a pdf at the root path, that wouldn't even require any HTML.
I directionally agree with this but, what do you do in three months when you change to the summer menu?
Take a picture of the menu, send through ChatGPT, read it over for mistakes, paste content into your website.
How do you "paste content into your website"? Did somebody build them a CMS?
The same way they built the website the first time.
The issue is priorities.
If you have long list of todos for a restaurant, why put building a website in the top 10?
But in reality there’s only a handful of things people care about for your restaurant: what, when, and where. Put up your menu, put up your hours, and put up your location. And a phone number.
It's those things but more as questions than things they want to read. What people actually care about for a restaurant is:
"Can you tell me if the food is good?"
"Can you tell me are the staff great?"
"Can you tell me what does it cost?"
and "Can you tell me where it is?" to an extent, especially if it's not on a major route.
People want answers that they can trust for those things. They want a trusted source to tell them the answers.
You can't really get any of those things from a Google search or a website (ignoring reviews because they're gamed to hell now). The majority of a restaurant's customers come from word-of-mouth recommendations or reputation through curated services like critics and directories especially at the top end. A good website helps for people who are visiting the area, or for restaurants that are very new and whose owners don't have a great network (or who wrongly believe a website is key to getting business), but for most restaurants the only way to drive business is to build a loyal base of people who tell their friends and colleagues about it.
If a restaurant is going to have a website at all it should be a great one, because bad websites shouldn't be a thing, but a restaurant could happily run for decades with just an Instagram page these days and it'd make no difference to their success.
> a restaurant could happily run for decades with just an Instagram page these days and it'd make no difference to their success.
Well they still need a website with a menu and hours or I'm not going to be there. You can't view an instagram page without an account.
No really we want to know when it's open, what it serves, and how much it costs. The quality conversation is completely separate.
> "Can you tell me if the food is good?"
> "Can you tell me are the staff great?"
> "Can you tell me what does it cost?"
> and "Can you tell me where it is?" to an extent, especially if it's not on a major route.
A restaurant's Instagram page - which is what this post is about - does not answer these questions in any way better than a restaurant's website does.
Sadly, at least in the Netherlands, most restaurant have to pay extortionary prices to aggregator sites like The Fork and others, that most people use to find restaurants and reserve a table. In addition they are incentivised to offer reduced prices on their meals, so the algorithm ranks them higher. So dominant is the role of the aggregator that the restaurant cannot afford not to be listed, and lose the customer base that flows in through these aggregators. Having their own website is of lower concern than doing this well.
I imagine location matters even more? A well placed restaurant with adequate food probably does good business, still?
Sure is. I was contrasting 'merits' of being listed at aggregator sites vs. having ones own website.