Yesterday, we rolled out our list of the five best Houston restaurant websites. Today is something different.
In scouring dozens of websites over the past week, we came to realize something. Restaurant websites in Houston are mostly terrible. This may be true of other industries as well, but it seemed particularly true of restaurants making it difficult to come up with what we considered the absolute worst.
To clear things up a bit, we set a few rules for ourselves. Any website that was just a single page of mostly text was eliminated from contention since it didn't really rise to the level of being a "website." Also, any template based websites generated through a Google or GoDaddy interface were not counted. For our money, restaurants really had to try and fail (sometimes miserably) to make this list.
After careful consideration, we offer you the five(ish) worst Houston restaurant websites.
5. Le Mistral
It's hard to believe a restaurant this nice can have a website that sucks this bad. At the top, just below the logo, is an annoying, spinning Flash slideshow that reverses course when you mouseover it. Font sizes are different on each page, and finding your way around is complicated since the links on every page except the front one are all the way at the bottom, forcing endless scrolling. The site doesn't even have its own domain name, instead residing on a server with only an IP address (like a street number only longer and more perfectly complicated). In short, it's a mess, which is a shame considering the glowing reviews it has received from many publications, including our own.
Like a crappy recipe, it should be back to the drawing board for your website, Le Mistral. Start by purchasing a domain name unless you think people can find you by remembering the IP address 98.199.225.47. Hint: they can't. Then, take that rotating Flash disaster out back and beat it to death with a shovel. We'll all be better for it.
District 7 Grill's website looks like a PowerPoint presentation thrown together by an accountant five minutes before a meeting. There are boxes with pictures and graphics strewn all over the page, and it's nearly impossible to figure out what the hell is going on. It took us a few minutes just to realize District 7 is promoting three separate restaurants on this one site. As if that weren't frustrating, some really cheesy music plays loudly in the background, and the only way to turn it off is to scroll down the page and locate the place to dear God MAKE IT STOP! This horrible excuse for a website certainly won't keep us from enjoying what are no doubt nice establishments, but someone needs to shake these folks and let them know their site is a travesty.
Listen D7G (can we call you that?), we're guessing someone who works for you thought they could put a good website together. They were wrong. Scrape that crazy stuff off the screen, erase that awful music, start over fresh and pretend it was all a bad dream.
