Many Restaurants Remain Oblivious to Mobile Web

A few years ago, for reasons that are still unclear, restaurants that created web pages went wild for Flash and graphics. You'd go to a restaurant's website and be forced to watch some lame animation or other alleged art, and then have to endure even more of it just to find out what was on the menu. You still do, in many cases.

This customer-unfriendly system is made worse with mobile phones. I'm heading to North Carolina early next month to give a couple of talks and was looking for places to eat in Chapel Hill, one of the stops. Bad move (on an iPhone, anyway). I did a Google map search and got a link to a place that, when selected, produced this image:

photo1.jpg

Not terribly helpful. But aha — when I expanded the page I noticed a link called "Menu":

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This was promising, until I clicked that link and got this:

restaurant photo 3

Maybe they'd have more customers if potential patrons could actually see what they have to offer.