Important Information for Restaurant Websites

If you are a restaurant owner who is considering a website or already have a website, you need to make sure the website company is willing to put your menu online in text format. Most website companies will build you a restaurant website and then make a pdf or image copy of your restaurant menu and put it on your website. Many times those pdf and image files are large and contain graphic images making them slow to load on a website, especially a Smartphone website.  In our opinion, this is NOT advisable and not the correct way to have a restaurant menu on your website.  Restaurants should have their menus on line in text format.  It is frustrating and unnecessary to make users have to download some image or pdf file to see your menu on their laptop and even more so on their Smartphones.  

So why do website companies not put your restaurant menu on line in text? Because it is quick and easy and because they would have to charge you for the conversion of the file to text and format the text to properly appear on your website.  Additionally they would also have to update the menu when you change menu items or prices, rather than just uploading a new pdf or image file.  It is much easier and cheaper for them to simply upload a new file.  Great for them, bad for you and your customers. All our restaurant websites have their menu's online in text format and when we price a restaurant website this feature is included, period.  Our restaurant websites and online menus alone, sets us apart from many other website companies in East Tennessee that build restaurant websites.

In addition to the frustration your users might experience by not having your menus online in text format, did you know that search engines can't read the text contained in a pdf file or image? That's right, so all the menu information that could potentially help your website SEO rankings cannot be read or indexed by the search engines.