by Theresa Carpine 19.August 2008 16:36
Something that most people don’t know about me is that I love to eat. Really. I spend an inordinate amount of my day thinking about what I am going to eat later on. And ironically, eating helps me to focus; I am pretty sure that my snacking abilities sustained me through four years of college lectures. So while you’ll usually find me munching on something at my desk, there is nothing quite like sitting down to a hearty meal with friends after a long day at work or play.
Unfortunately, I also possess very limited cooking abilities. So besides simply eating, another one of my favorite activities is eating out! While eating out is decidedly taxing (literally) on the pocketbook, my bad habit also provides the inspiration for this blog post: restaurant websites.
As with any business, what an owner includes on their restaurant’s website depends on the individual establishment. But here are some of my suggestions, as a seasoned restaurant website surfer, for the most important information to include, and some other fun ideas.
All the essentials (name, address, phone number and hours of operation) should be easily found on the homepage because a potential client is probably searching for one of those four facts. Including a photo or graphic of your restaurant’s marquee, so patrons will recognize it when they drive by, is also a good idea. A few quality images of your restaurant will also make the website more interesting visually. A contact email can also be included, but only if you’re going to check it and respond to it on a regular basis.
If you’re going to have a website with multiple pages, I suggest including the menu to give people a quick glance of what you have to offer. A word of warning, however, on menus: make sure that the menus are updated frequently to reflect changes in seasonal fare; I find it a little irritating when I’m looking at a restaurant’s “winter” menu in June.
Providing a menu on a website is especially useful your restaurant offers a call ahead service for To-Go orders. If you really want to get fancy, you could even include an online order form, as seen on the website of the oft heralded Mindfly neighbor, Rocket Donuts.
Finally, I would encourage restaurateurs to provide a personal message about the history of their establishment on a website. Yeah, it’s kind of cheesy, but a lot of people, like me, like cheese (mmm...cheese), especially if they’re interested to know if you use locally-produced and organic ingredients, or if there are any local charitable organizations that your restaurant regularly supports. And, of course, a blog is an easy and personal way to inform people of special events at your restaurant, like live music, and to keep your website’s content fresh and current.
by Karina Beattiger 13.August 2008 08:15
As some may have figured out by now, my not-so-secret goal in life is to sell the books I write, become a whoop-de-doo romance author on the NY Times Bestselling List, make lots of money doing it, and then show up wearing shutter shades and saying things like, "Ta, darling, I simply must get these edits in." (Yes, I'd be trading a life with one set of deadlines for two. I know.) The only thing standing between me and total romance-market domination is getting the darn book finished. The blasted middle just doesn't want to be written.
This brings me to my point: how making websites is like writing a book.
In the writing world, there is a condition -- a blight, if you will -- called "The Sagging Middle". This is the phrase used to describe the obstacle of or problem with a full-length book. (Trivia: A book that is approximately 100,000 words is called a single-title book, while a book less than 80,000 -- like a Harlequin novel -- is called category. I write single-title.) 100,000 words is a lot of writing. It's 400 pages, more or less, of double-spaced Courier New, 12pt, 1-inch margin type. At least 15 chapters, sometimes as high as 30. It's a beginning, a middle, and an end. Sometimes an epilogue. I hate epilogues, but this is beside the point. I'm also not a fan of prologues. I'm an equal-opportunity -logue-hater.
Most authors have no problems with the beginning or the end. In both sections of a book, the action is high, the drama is high, the pace is fast and furious. You're setting up or wrapping up the plot. Bullets are flying, dialogue is sexy, the music is loud. Whatever the case, you have meat to the matter and you know exactly what to write. And then there's the middle. The middle is where the action slows down. The climax of the story (har har, don't think I don't know what you're thinking) has not been hit yet. The Great Reveal is still lurking in the shadows. An author must somehow push the plot along without losing the substance of the book, keep the reader interested. It's far, far too easy to gloss over the middle, thereby causing it to -- you guessed it -- sag. Suddenly, the middle just isn't as strong as either the beginning or the end.
(Am I the only one who skipped over most of the Sam/Frodo "I'm walking, I'm walking, I'm tired, We're walking" scenes from the The Two Towers and Return of the King books? ... Just checking. Please put the torch and pitchfork away.)
Creating websites mirrors this almost exactly. It starts with the client meeting and design. Excitement is high. We've got ideas, ready to design and implement! It ends with the finished product. The cut is in place, the markup is sweet, the whole thing is uploaded to be adored by adoring viewers!
The Sagging Middle begins with the end of the home page design.
I freely admit I suffer from this blight in all things, up to and including my own web page designs. I start with the home page. It's gorgeous. It looks like candy. I want to lick it. And then I start cutting. Whee, cutting! Markup, CSS, all the works. And then I click on one of the links that take me to an internal page and I stop. And I stare. And my mind goes blank for a good long minute. And then I think to myself, What the blazes are you thinking, you idiot?!
I have forgotten, or not cared, to design the internal pages with as much forethought as I took for the home page. I have engineered my own Sagging Middle. The design of the home page is pretty, the content is good, but the bridge between the two -- the prettiness of the front page and the awesomeness that is the textual content -- is completely missing.
Let's be honest. No one who isn't writing a thesis or specifically looking for a quote is going to waste the time to wade through a wall of text. Designing elements to break up the monotony of the internal "meat of the matter" pages is every bit a part of the "making a website" process as getting characters from point A to point B without killing them is a part of writing a book. If a reader gets to the middle of the book and, lo and behold, get bored mid-way through, they will put it down and go find something else to do. Then you get bad reviews on Amazon, someone flames your blog... it's civil war, man.
The concept holds true on websites. The link or button or little 'x' at the top of the browser is just a heartbeat away, and viewers will click it. Make no mistake. You have to keep them there. It's only one part what you're writing, and everything to do with how you're writing it and what it looks like. Face it, webpage-makers: we site visitors are a vain, shallow, judgmental breed, and we will close a site at the drop of a hat. I've been known to do so, myself.
Web Developer Weems wrote a blog article about designers and home pages, which is actually a great precursor to how to avoid The Sagging Middle. The concept is simple: design all the types of pages. All of them. Don't design the home page and then casually mention, "Hey, there's two more types of pages, just make it look like it goes with the home page." That's the same as saying, "The characters start in Seattle looking for a murderer who killed the girl's cousin and then they fall in love and end in New York just as a comet hits it. Somewhere in the middle, a guy is going to die, so just go ahead and fill in whatever there, get them to New York, and make it sound right." (In writing, the concept for avoiding The Sagging Middle goes more like write an outline, you lazy slacker of a writer, so it's at least similar.)
The reason I bring this up is because, well, I am guilty of a Sagging Middle. I love making home pages, love writing beginnings and endings to books, and utterly fail at keeping up the pace towards the middle of the project. This is something I am not only encouraging myself to work on, but everyone out there who makes web pages and/or writes books. Get it down to a system, and you will never go wrong.
... Well, "never" at least until the comet hits.
by Theresa Carpine 1.August 2008 09:54
If you walk into the Mindfly design studio—with a snazzy, new desk configuration to maximize workspace and create a more collaborative work environment—and say hello, it might take a moment for anyone to respond. We don’t mean to be rude. We’re all just busy making and running websites. We also have our headphones jammed in our ears and plugged into our computers because we’re listening to Pandora.
Founder Tim Westergren and a group of musicians started the Music Genome Project began back in 2000. The idea was to analyze and classify music based on “melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony” (About the Music Genome Project®). With tens of thousands of artists and song classified, the Pandora radio service was launched in 2005.
Go to Pandora and enter the name of an artist or a song. A radio station is created, selecting other songs with musical attributes similar to your request. You can then further design the station by adding more artists to the mix, and by giving songs a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” to help Pandora better tailor a station to suit your tastes.
Since it is a free radio service (a paid subscription is also available), there are a couple limitations because of licensing restrictions. It’s currently only available for residents in the United States. You can’t rewind or replay a song, but you can skip or pause music. Pandora is also not allowed to play a particular song or artists on demand. But if you’re just dying to hear a certain song again, they provide quick links to iTunes and Amazon so you can purchase the song or album.
I test the true of the effectiveness of a Pandora station based on how closely it can emulate my iPod playlists. Why not just listen to iTunes then? Because I like the fact that Pandora stations also throw out some music by artists I haven’t heard of, but that they think I’ll like based on my previous requests.