Style over substance
Posted by Joseph on Sunday, May 17th, 2009
Let’s cut to the chase!
Who is advising restaurants, bars and clubs that what their visitors want is a Flash(tm) animated brochure?
When I look up a bar, restaurant or club / music venue, I’m usually after a few basic slices of information, like where it is located, what the food is like or what’s on tonight or this weekend. Of course there is a lot more you’d want to know about a venue, but these are what I would think are core pieces of information many people would be wanting from a venue’s website. Unfortunately many venues have been advised by their “web people” to publish a set of slick, glossy pictures of the venue, in a Flash slideshow/animation sequence, utilising Flash navigation, and not a great deal more.
Can anyone explain to me why these bars, restaurants and clubs don’t bother looking at what visitors want from websites and help these same prospective clients find it on their websites? Is it really in a venue’s interest to hide the location map somewhere unexpected or provide their menu as a downloadable PDF? And music venues and dance clubs: Thanks for the pictures of the pretty people who cone to your place, specially the hot babes! but since I came to your site to find out more about a night out at your venue from a flyer someone handed me, can you provide more information besides re-presenting the flyer I already have a copy of? Or did you think the babes were enough? hmm, I thought so.
Can you not tell me about the artists who will be playing, DJing there, any reviews of past gigs, what the drinks cost, whether you also have snacks, what time the club closes, when it’s not available due to a “private party” and any other thing that would make me interested in coming to your venue, instead of what YOU want to tell me?
Have you a Facebook group? A mySpace page? A twitter stream? If so, can you tie them together so I can find the others through any one of them?
If not, can you spare a couple hours a week to connect with your people out there? There’s plenty of excelent on-line tools and APIs to help you do this.
Oh, and if you want to be found through popular searches, just make sure there is something serachable and index-able on your site.
… just sayin!
Filed in User-Centred,communication,content,general,marketing,usability | 2 responses so far
2 Responses to “Style over substance”
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Good point made about ‘who is advising restaurants to build a Flash web site?’.
I never thought about it in that specific way, but far too many restaurants have a Flash site.
It’s also the case with many night clubs and similar institutions.
I am also wondering about who those people behind making those kinds of sites are?
How much are they charging for it?
Bizzare stuff!
Just recently I spoke to a local coffee shop owner who is in the process of getting a web site and he said to me ‘our developers built the site in Flash first and now are changing it to HTML as it does not SEO properly’.
How much negligence about the overall situation is that sentence implying?
Horrible!
Completely agree Jason, and it is up to professionals like us to make clear at briefing what the pitfalls are. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with creating an SEO-choking flash site so long as you tell them that only people who already know about you and know your brand name and URL will be able to find you.