I know a few restaurateurs and they simply don't care, even more so than other types of small brick-and-mortar shops. First, they operate on very thin margins and most of the time simply can't or don't want to afford extra services such as a website. Moreover, most of their first-time customers still get there by word-of-mouth. It's as if most of the sector marketing-wise is still pretty much stuck in the early nineties.
There tend to be two classes of them:
Far away owners. They come to the store once a week, handle some of the finances, but mostly, someone else manages the store. The owner puts in minimal effort, the manager has a hard time spending money to effect any changes
Owner/Operators. They're often cooking or other help around the restaurant. They work a ton of hours, and don't have time for much else. Many of them "don't do computers".
Neither of these groups is going to make their own website in most situations, unless they're relatively tech savvy. So they hire someone to do it, but then it never gets updated with menu and hour changes, specials and new technology.
The internet is full of bad advice and the phone book is full of bad consultants. It's actually quite hard to be a good consultant to this kind of business. They're hard to work with and aren't willing to spend very much.
> There is no setup fee or minimum term (even for our free plan).
>Can I stay on the free plan forever? Definitely. If you operate a small business or are simply growing, we want to support you. Our premium features are aligned to those of a larger restaurant, so once you’re more established you’ll have the ability to upgrade, but it’s all up to you!
and you don't put ads on the restaurant's site either, so there is no revenue coming in to you on that end. Maybe I missed something when I was digging around?
Of all the websites I look at, restaurant ones are the most likely to fail horribly on mobile.
I guess it's because restaurant owners/managers 'buy' a website from a small contractor, and what they look for and are willing to pay for is something that looks 'pretty' -- lots of flash, lots of big graphics, etc.
The fact is, Flash isn't supported on mobile devices. It's merely possible on Android. Sure, you can't blame the restaurants (you don't need to blame anyone), but "simply install Flash" isn't true.
It sounds as if you love saying it.
Anyway, I agree with gp: so many restaurant websites seem to focus on being cool more than on providing the information I need: address and menu. And yes, Flash is a big part of this but even if that worked on iOS, these websites would still be annoying.
And "simply install flash"? It doesn't work on iOS, it hasn't been supported on Android in over a year, and has stability issues on Jelly Bean. I could almost be convinced that you're being facetious...almost.
I doubt that restaurant owners are thinking "So my customers can't see my website? I don't care, it's because they picked an Apple device and everyone knows Apple devices are shitty!"
Um, what?
And do you really hate saying it?
So my questions are:
1. In reality is utilizing this feature a real hurdle?
2. Any other way to do this w/o mangling DNS records?
