Formatting Your Menu for Online Viewing Among the most controversial aspects of restaurant web design how printed documents are best formatted for the web. For restaurant owners who are putting up websites, deciding how the menu is going to be presented will be one of the most important choices in the whole process. If your menu is presented in the wrong way, you may end up giving visitors the impression that your restaurant is not very professional and that your food is not very good. There are quite a few pitfalls that you can end up falling prey to here, so be sure you consider the following information.
Document Formats If you’ve ever been to a government website and have requested a form that you need to print out and fill out, you’re familiar with what’s called the portable document format, or PDF. This is a proprietary format of the Adobe Corporation that allows printed materials to be reproduced very faithfully on the screen. It’s also one of the most awkward – but most commonly used – formats for restaurant web design. Using this format requires that the visitor’s browser has a plug-in that allows them to read it or that they download the document so that they can open it in a separate program. A PDF is advantageous in some ways where reproducing a menu is concerned. Principally, you can give people the exact image of the menu that they will have in their hands when they sit down at your tables, which allows you to preserve the design that you paid for already. The problem is that the design of your printed menu may not be particularly useful on the screen. If you can have a good restaurant website design expert redesign the format for you so that it can be represented in
HTML, you might be doing your visitors a great service by allowing them to forgo dealing with a PDF formatted document and the hassles that come with it. Graphics While it may sound silly, it significant that it doesn’t take any time for your eye to download an image. It does take time for your Internet browser to download an image. This isn’t really a big concern on a broadband connection, but be aware that many of the people looking at your restaurant website will likely be doing so on a mobile device. These have slower 3G or 4G connections that make downloading images of pain, in some cases. You don’t necessarily need an image of every single dish on your menu. As long as you provide the pricing table and the other basic information about the dish, in your restaurant web design, you’re providing enough information. Remember that, when it’s presented online, your menu has to follow the principles of good restaurant web design. These are much different principles than the principles of good graphic design for printed materials. If you’re confused as to how to have your menu reproduced on your website, talk with your designer about the issue and ask them for their input. They’ll usually be able to present you with some great ideas.