Good restaurant websites have information not only about their daily operations, but calendar of up'n coming events, banquets, recipe page.     The more diversity in entertainment whether live or for private parties, the more important a website becomes.     Expertise in the area of wedding receptions, or children birthday parties, can generate significant revenues.     Photo gallery page designed with samples of past events when well done is a major motivator to others to hold their family event or company party at your place!

    It seems the No. 1 complaint that we receive is .. "too much information."

    We have attempted to correct that .. above .. link.     Thank you.


Restaurant Entertainment Schedule -   Rachada Thai   Shop LV Page Version       Rachada Thai (after)

If you feel your menu should look as good, if not better,
than your table menu online, then you've found the right publisher!

Cow Pot Thai Restaurant -   Lunch Specials   &   Late Night Menu

Appetizers     Drinks     Desserts     Special Hot Pot Sukiyaki Dinner Menu -   Soups     Salads     Curries     Rice Dishes     Seafood     Entrees Shrimp     Noodle Soups     Fried Noodles     Special Order     Side Orders

Miami Beach, Florida

    Please note that this establishment has a contact info page which we discourage, ie, homepage/top.

Now that you are seriously considering having your menu online, possibly with us, we would like to add emphasis to why we feel the online menu should look/be as good as the one you present to your guest at your establishment. Here is an article written for the Las Vegas Review Journal in August 12, 1998, "The Art of the Menu".

Pizza Illustrations   .. newspaper inserts is not the only way... Case Study

    The latest "find" was a Thai restaurant website in Sante Fe Springs, California (my old home of twenty-five years backyard.)     Critique.
Same vendor, different advertiser:   Olympic Gyros  

    Always trying to stay one step ahead of the game, we are looking at our next metro market, Miami / Miami Beach and Ft Lauderdale.     Looking for keywords on restaurants, I found Open Table which seems to have restaurant listings for several cities in the United States and because of the poor presentation they provide their advertisers, perfect!

    Emeril's New Orleans Fish House, Las Vegas is "temporarily" off line .. just like Nick's Fishmarket of Hawaii, Miami.     Amazing .. coincidence, or just plain unnecessary service (and cost.)
    Open Table says "Free"
    -- free to the customer; not the advertiser $$$.




    For those that may not be familiar with the "Las Vegas Scene," Emeril's is located in the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino, one of the finest properties on the Las Vegas Strip.     Here is a write-up about Emeril's.

      The spacious restaurant, seating 225 people, was renovated to reflect the origin of Emeril's seafood creations.     From the soft glowing blues, to the wave like wood accents, to the metal wavy sculptures (looking like seaweed flowing with the underwater current) running up the sand colored walls, to the fish scale tiles and aqua colored leathers in the patio area - one would think that they are dining at the palace of King Neptune.

Summary -- then why all the hoop-la, re:   expense of online reservations?     Simple.     Your web advertising is to motivate the potential customers to either pick up the phone and contact you or to get in their car and come to your place.     (We try to get right down to basics, ie, K.I.S.S. method.)     K.I.S.S. method to save you time and money!     Call them, and find out for yourself @ (702) 891-7374.

    Of course, we would like to compare our services (and rates) with other such vendors, but it is awful difficult because they usually don't want to publish their rates.     Here is an ambiguous exception:   Open Table Pricing is something like "having to fill 12 seats" -- how often is not indicated like the self-proclaimed average per month column.     If that's the case, our cost for a robust, multi-page layout is $250 for the entire year (plus) and if your guest table spend roughly $40, then six (6) tables .. for the year.

    Now, for the infrastruction of Open Table and four consistent illustrations of their restaurant listings:

    Now, that you have had a chance to look at these four (4) good bad examples, a quiz question.     They all sound like very nich establishments .. based upon their business name.     How would you grade their listing?   .. the layout?     If you give any of them better than a "F", I'm sorry, I don't think we can help you.     End of exercise.

    But, if you started to feel sick to your stomach, then there is hope.

    This one, I wouldn't expect you or anyone else to believe unless you visit the website yourself.     Here you have a restaurant that (evidently) doesn't believe in promoting its menu because all I could find (from their links) was a Take-Out Order Menu that you can not read.     Don't believe?     Appetizers     Entrées     There is no window option to full-size; only minimize and close.     Try live @ The Forge to see for yourself.

    The Forge, and may others, that have paid quite a bit for what we term "Holly-weird Flash" (without content) is a horrific business decision mistake, in our opinion.     Please see "The Art of the Menu" for background info for restauranteurs.

    An interesting approach .. frames.     Frames are a poor substitute for (publishing) page construction.     Their menu is broken into sections by page (which in itself is fine,) but if your customers want to print it out, waste paper (and time) with frame section; then content (menu.)     Try it for yourself please:   Lunch Menu.     Pros/Cons -- body section prints without frame margin and up to 660 pixel without right truncation.

    Now, from the homepage photo, this is one classy place.     Click on the logo to see for yourself, or here.

    Again, content, menu, etc. is lacking.     "The scrollable menu" - .. with nothing to scroll.     Contact info that would have made a terrific homepage, with a tweak or two.

"Contact information," directions (dynamic map) and hours of operation belong on the homepage.

    A marvelous photo of the dining area may also be place under key information...     p.s.   Great night photo of the establishment.

Illustration references:   Scroll Menu   Contact Info  

p.p.s.   Not to critize Italian Cuisine establishments, but they are normally more progressive to technology
and all professional opinions herein are meant to be constructive criticism only.

Miami Beach 411       Dining off the beach ..     Capital Grille

    The first thing that we would like to point out about this site and how they treat their advertisers is (a) the space and (b) the overall page design, ie, busy on both left and right columns (to your advertisement or restaurant listing.)

    Just in case this advertiser disappears, I have captured images to illustrate this restaurant, Capital Grille.

    Sample Listing     Another "feature" that should be a big hit with advertisers is its dynamic map capability where it not only list your map address, but everyone else in your area!     Gee, ain't that nice?     And, to make it easier for the guest (you haven't got yet,) they are all listed alphabetically!     Gee, with an online restaurant directory like that, who needs enemies?     Please take a closer look at the Capital Grille page, below the map feature for the restaurant info.     Did you find it?     I know, it's in small print and everything else above it is so big, but we clipped just that much of the listing page, leaving out the left/right columns, etc. so that you could better find it.

    Now, to conclude this good bad example, clippings of the restaurant listing starting at the top, giving the basic information and sections of its menu, listed like .. a list:   Capital Grille, Appetizers, Soups & Salads, Entrées, and Seafood.     Please, please keep in mind that these are clippings of the menu and there is no hyperlink connectivity indexes to literally "jump" to them .. like our version you will see later.

Google Adsense .. in your menu

    Now, for those that may have missed it in the "roster-type" menu listing, in the advertiser's Soups & Salads Section, the publisher / vendor places Google Ads right in their menu!

    By having an appropriate (steak) cuisine photo aligned with advertisement(s) for someone else embedded in the menu, many viewers would not know the difference between the advertiser, Capital Grille, and the publisher's aim, to generate revenues for themselves and not the advertiser.

    This is a practice that Shop Las Vegas or our future Miami site would ever engage in.     You can depend on our business ethics and that includes banners on advertiser's page -- never.


Reviews and Other Links on an Advertiser's Page

    Reviews is a "double-edge sword" and we will never now or in the future condone integrating a feature that could hurt our advertisers.     We do not want to place ourselve in a position of mediator and anyone that has ever managed a restaurant knows you can not please everyone.     Some sites like Yahoo! Locals requires that advertisers agree to such terms.     Not here; never.

    Yes, we integrate links to make the overall directory scheme easy to navigate and this insures that either now or some day in the future, a browser may consider your establishment.     Placing such links whether on the side, or bottom of your ad page is clutter and distracting for our advertisers.

    If what we have shown you appeals to you, you will not have to go to Miami to get listed on such a site.     There are at least two (2) such sites that offer the same (busy) page infrastructure and destroy your menu taste and we will be happy to direct you.     In fact, we have talked to several that have tried, signed a one month/three month contract and now have had such a terrible experience that they just aren't interested in doing it right.     Their lose, of course.     We won't mention their name, but there was one that comes to mind right down the street from my home-based business on Durango that even had door hangers made up with the website promo on it.     Gee, I wonder which lasted longer, the online contract or their door hangers...
 
Summary     .. our Capital Grille     .. their Capital Grille
Miami-Shopper.com coming soon for the South Coast!

    We are here to serve you; to represent your best interest and provide you with your own page or pages and a menu suitable for your establishment tables.     If you missed the article at the top of this section, please take a look The Art of the Menu and if you feel like we do that your menu should be presented in a positive tone, alluding the atmosphere of your cuisine, then we need to talk.     Thank you.
 

Your Advertisement Project

    We treat your advertisement like a fine piece of art.

    If you haven't published before, ie, brochure, flyer; then, you need to turn over your material to a pro that has.

    Frank is old fashion, very old fashion and hand codes all his web publishing just like the image to the right to project painting and the image to the left to project a masterpiece.

    Please keep in mind the environment which is engineered with some of the most sophisticated software development project Frank has ever endeavored in.     It represents a decade of work preceded by two decades of major engineering projects from aerospace to financial systems.

    The two combined makes it possible for us to design an infrastructure that works like a major shopping mall, only in cyberspace; cyberspace that logistically makes it possible for the highest level of distribution and potential customers for your advertisement to be seen.         Artwork by Tantra Restaurant and Lounge, Miami Beach, Florida
 

Before & After     Whoops!     Found another one!     Before * and After		Changed * Added theme wallpaper * Removed redundant phone/email * Realigned message @ top * Marquee adjusted ..
FYI, images reduced from original over-size plus made transparent for wallpaper.   Logo   Baby   Warped Photo * Oops .. website is history .. I hate when that happens -- especially when I use it for illustrations.     Fortunately, we had archived the homepage and restored it here.

 

Space Comparison

    Starting with a standard sheet of 8.5 x 11 paper which is about twice the size of a computer monitor screen area.

    Now, we refer to this amount of space (in our bottom page package) as "The Business Card" because to us, it is relatively small, like a business card.

    Anywhere else, space with embedded banner ads of your competition, annoying "busy content" of the vendor and your twenty-five words and one (1) graphic at $50 a month is standard.



The Anchor Page

    This gives our advertisers the space they need to say a lot about their service as well as themselves without feeling cramped.     Some of you may want to emphasize your campaign with photos and we feel that that should be provided for, or why offer anything at all to our advertisers?

    We want our advertisers to have the impression of like walking into a new home model with a large entry area that opens to a great room design with plenty of living and dining area with an open kitchen to boot!

    Your Anchor Page, like the one above, acts as your own homepage with links to two additional, full-length pages.     Space-wise, the equivalent of 7.5 - 8 standard printed pages.

    We purposely left the chart lines hanging to reflect the potential for adding additional web pages and to build a more robust web area for your business needs.

    And, please, do not look at the diagram illustrations as actual size depictions.     For the sake of brevity and space conciseness, we chose to indicate quantity versus actual size.     Anchor Plus by far, is the best advertising package avaialbe anywhere.




Restaurants



    A page linked to your very own homepage with every possible need of your eatery.

    Again, expansion is never an issue.     For instance, your photo gallery of past events grows to the point that you may want a tree of pages, we are ready to assist you.

(1)   Upgrade Policy   .. we couldn't be fairer

(2)   Search Engines   .. your page(s) will be optimized for S/Es

(3)   Banner Advertising   .. pick from group - category pages     Franchise Pages

(4)   Additional web pages with "Anchor Plus" Package, avg cost $50;   Other Services

        For example,   Having a Tips Page
    Advertiser's Holiday Coupon

Getting started (1)   Packaging (2)   Proof Process (3)   Visit Homepage @ Hesitating .. (1)   The Decision .. to advertise     Top 18 (2)   Waiting ..   Fantastic Indoor Swapmeet (3)   City Licenses     Attrition   Restaurants

2006 & 2007 Holidays!	Our gift to you when you order by November 30th ..       .. save even more over our everyday, low prices       As of December 1st, you can still save 10%   ad material received by November 20th, will insure     in time for Thanksgiving holiday period !
(702) 363-3290