Why restaurant websites are so very, very bad

I think this is my favorite

http://www.l2orestaurant.com/

not an example of bad, just trying to say there are good ones out there.

A lot of times people hit a website to look at the menu and prices.  Maybe a few pictures of food and reviews.  That's about it folks.  It's not rocket science.

Yeah, I think that too much animation and background music just slow me down.  The background music is always a little too cheesy. If you are serving more modern fare I think the website needs to be a little trendy/modern to reflect that.

Lol... I get to blame all those sorta things on our Marketing People.  They do try hard though.

I despise background music on all websites, not just restaurant ones.  First off half the time I can't stand the music they are playing and secondly I often surf with my own music on.

Hahaha my wife was just talking about this article on Friday. She is a User Experience Architect for a major on line retailer here, and has been doing usability on websites and web applications since before it was even a thing. She is soooo hardcore when it comes to focusing on the users needs. She tried to be a freelance web designer, however she could not stand to work with the business owners. They have in there minds what they think is best and what they want the users to do that they forget what people are actually coming to the site for in the first place.

One of the things that drives us nuts is when people start off with "Welcome to <insert website here>" Business owners think we actually read on the net, and trying to tell them differently is a waste of time. I am not saying you shouldn't have detailed info on your site about how awesome you are and where your food comes from, that stuff is really important too, however the user should not have to wade through all that crap to find the very few things that 95% of the visitors come to a restaurant site for... The menu, the address, the phone number, and the hours of operation. And do NOT use flash unless you have a freakin ninja flash developer. It's to slow, with proper HTML 5 and CSS 3 you can do most of the same things.

And for gods sake... have your web designer build you a mobile site, and keep it simple. 

Sorry this ended up as a bit of a rant and was not meant to be hahaha

@succotash... I have to disagree that a site needs to be trendy if you have trendy food, however it has to fit with your brand identity. Brand is very important... trendy... not so much.

Our favourite sushi place doesn't even have a website.. I wanted to show the menu to my husband one day so I had to look it up on Urbanspoon. 

RG my husband does alot of web design too and he has the same gripes as your wife.  More often than not the clients don't know what they want (and in the case of some what they're talking about) so it's up to the web designer to be a mind reader at times. 

I like to check out restaurant's websites before I go and I also tend to google reviews as well.  Some of those I take with a grain of salt... like the ones I found when we went to Disneyworld... we stayed at a "value" resort because we were there for the parks and it was fine... if we wanted spa treatment we'd have gone for that!