Developers of websites intended for bars, restaurants, bistros, and cafes in Calgary, Airdrie, Edmonton, Red Deer, Lethbridge, and many other cities in Alberta are notorious for creating web sites with bad design. This is because of the voluminous images and excessive elements that makes it difficult for the visitors to determine exactly what their menus contain.

The fact is most visitors of such sites only want a few things, give those to them and they’ll be happy. Waste their time with excessive design elements, slow loading javascript, and other bells and whistles and they’ll find some other place to eat or drink.

We gain strength from the usual weakness of designers. At Etopian, we avoid the following design snags:

• Having too much stuff: Websites for restaurants and bar tend to be laden with images, flash animations and outlandish fonts. The layout may be acceptable for desktop computers, but not really for mobile phones. The trick is to keep things low key and subtle.
• Using PDFs for menus: Mobile web is not too friendly on PDF files. Embedding PDFs on the website only creates bigger problems, as many users browse through restaurant menus from their mobile phones. PDFs are not compatible to many mobile devices and even when they are, their use is less than desirable.
• Placing contact information in a .jpeg or .gif format: We make sure that our clients amass as many customer as they can. As such, we allow them to tout convenience by putting their contact numbers in text. This makes it easier for punters to copy paste or click.

Responsive design

In addition to avoiding these snags, we also recommend that our Alberta-based client opt for a responsive website which will look good on all devices including the phone, the tablet, or the desktop. So no matter where their prospective customers happen to be, they can get the information that they need to facilitate their decision to come to their place of business.