I was curious about a new restaurant and went looking for their website to see their menu. What I found was a hot mess that they apparently paid a local company to create for them. I hope they didn't pay too much.

The ugly, garish site is built using Wordpress. The "about" page still has the default stock photo and the "Lorem Ipsum" dummy text. The menu is displayed as either JPGs in a lightbox or a PDF file, both of which suck to read on a smartphone.

The "photo gallery" has more than a hundred awful pocket/cellphone camera photos of empty dining rooms, bored looking customers, pissed off looking employees, and numerous views of the same signs and decorations (tip: pick one, preferably the best one).

It also looks like the website creator set them up a Twitter and Facebook page, neither of which has any posts. They didn't bother to set them up in Google Maps/Places. They don't show up on Google search unless you know the name (and the HTML page title and metadata tags have the wrong city!). There's only one diner review on Urbanspoon (at least it's favorable), but no restaurant provided info. They don't show up at all on TripAdvisor or Yelp.

I hope the poor restaurant owners didn't pay more than $50 or $100 for this shoddy work, and even that would be too much. The "developer's" own website is almost as bad, which should have been a clue. The restaurant's domain name is registered by the developer, meaning the restaurant doesn't own it or control it. They're probably paying out the wazoo for that and web hosting, too. They'd have been better off to not pay anything at all and just setting up a free Facebook page or something.

Sorry, this just bugs me because it's sad and wrong. It also reflects poorly on their business. People who don't know anything about setting up a website for their business should be more careful about wasting good money on inferior work. They should budget enough to get the job done right, and it shouldn't cost that much more for a proper, basic website. There are plenty of companies around town who can do a good job.