Another pretty but user-unfriendly restaurant website

Remember how a couple weeks ago I blogged about how unfriendly the Meadowlark Restaurant website was because it crammed its functional information into a small box with a scrollbar? Well today I read about a new restaurant and their new website does the same thing, meriting another entry in my blog’s Web design (bad) category.

Today’s culprit? Joya’s Bistro, whose site you can see either in the screenshot below (which you can click to zoom) or at the actual website:

The screenshot, again from my admittedly big ass 1920x1200 screen, like the Meadowlark website, has a helluva lot of wasted space. The main content, again like the Meadowlark website, is divided into a pretty picture and some text, and the portion of the Joya website reserved for the functional information—whether that information is their menu or their events—is only about 350x300 pixels, small enough that you have to scroll in order to see all the text.

Two things make Joya Bistro’s website even worse than that of the Meadowlark:

One, it’s Flash-based. Why on earth should somebody need Adobe Flash to visit a restaurant’s website? Because someone visiting a restaurant’s website wants to listen to music instead of reading the restaurant’s menu?!

Two, the menu doesn’t even include prices. Go to Meadowlark’s website and you can find out how their food costs, even if you do have to scroll a bit; don’t bother going to Joya’s website if you care about finding out their prices.

Update 4/7/11: Are you a restaurant owner who wants a pretty website in which you can cram the important stuff into a small box with a scrollbar? Contact papadokComputing, a Dayton-based company offering “premium IT Consulting and Solutions for both the home and business environment.” To visit Papadok’s website is to understand how Joya’s website came to be.

Update 5/2/13: Sadly, Joya’s Bistro closed in March 2012.

I thought for a while that papadokComputing might also be out of business because my link to their site, http://papadok.com (no “www”), no longer works, redirecting to the non-existent http://www.papdok.com site. http://www.papadok.com (with the “www”) works, but it’s poor practice not to check whether your domain name without the “www” is working.