A Site Where the Menu Is a Download

The site

A neighbourhood restaurant with an attractive site: good photographs, an address, hours, and a booking link.

The navigation has one item called Menu, and it opens a document.

On a phone it downloads, then opens in a viewer as a page-sized image that has to be pinched and dragged.

Two of the three menus are dated from before the last price change, which nobody has noticed because nobody on the staff opens them.

The inference a visitor makes

• They are deciding where to eat.
• They are on a phone, possibly walking.
• They want two things: is there something I want, and what does it cost.
• The download takes six seconds.
• Then it needs zooming.

Most people give up at that point and check somebody else, and the restaurant never learns this happened. The document was opened, which counts as a visit, and the outcome was a decision to eat elsewhere.

Why the menu specifically is the worst case

Since the general argument about documents applies with more force here than anywhere.

It is the single most requested piece of information on the site, requested more than the address and the hours combined.

It changes several times a year, which means the document is republished and the old one frequently stays linked somewhere.

It is exactly the content people search for by dish, which a document does not surface.

And it is read almost entirely on phones, at the moment of deciding, which is the situation a page-sized layout serves worst.

Every property of a menu argues against publishing it as a document.

What a page gives you instead

Which is not only readability.

Search can read the dishes, so somebody searching for a specific thing in your area can find you.

The text can be enlarged, read aloud, and translated, which a scanned or laid-out document cannot.

It loads instantly rather than downloading.

It can be updated in a minute when a price changes, which means it stays accurate.

And you can link directly to the lunch section rather than telling somebody to scroll a document.

A worked example

A restaurant moved its three menus from documents onto pages, keeping the same items and prices.

The work took an afternoon, mostly retyping.

Within three months those pages were their most visited by a wide margin, and they began appearing in search for dish names they had never ranked for.

Telephone calls asking whether they had a particular dish dropped.

They also discovered, in the retyping, that two items on the printed document had not been served since the previous year.

Nobody had read the document closely enough to notice.

The objection about design

Which is the reason usually given for the document.

The printed menu is designed, and a web page cannot reproduce that typography, so publishing it as a document preserves the look.

The answer is that nobody is admiring your menu's typography on a phone at half past six.

They are looking for a dish and a price, and a plain readable page serves that better than a beautiful one they cannot read.

Where the design genuinely matters, publish the page and offer the document as an additional download for anybody who wants it.

That satisfies both and takes ten extra minutes.

Where else this pattern appears

Since restaurants are the clearest case and not the only one.

A price list, a service list, a rate card, a specification sheet, or a brochure containing the only description of what a business sells.

In each case the most wanted information on the site has been placed inside a file rather than on a page.

The test is whether the document contains something a visitor came looking for.

Where it does, that content belongs on a page, whatever else the document is also used for.

The listing menu matters too

Which is where a good share of people actually look and where the site's problem is repeated.

Most local listings allow a menu to be entered as text or linked, and a business that has linked its document has moved the same problem somewhere more visible.

Entering the items directly means the dishes appear in the listing itself, which is where somebody standing on a street corner is looking.

Update both at the same time, since a listing menu from two price rises ago is worse than none at all.

That is ten minutes a year and it reaches more people than the website does.

Say when the menu last changed

Which is a small addition that solves a problem the document version was creating invisibly.

Somebody who ate there in the spring and is checking whether a dish is still on wants to know they are looking at the current version.

A line saying the menu was updated in a given month costs nothing and removes that doubt.

It also gives you a reason to review it, since a date visible on the page is a date somebody will eventually notice is old.

That is the useful kind of date: attached to something that genuinely changes, rather than to an article that does not.

The counter-case within the site

The rest of this site is good.

The hours are current, the address is clear with parking noted, the photographs are of the actual room, and the booking link works.

Somebody who already knows they want to eat there is well served.

The failure is entirely in serving somebody who has not decided yet, which is the larger group.

And a takeaway menu that genuinely needs printing is a perfectly fair reason to keep the document available alongside the page.

Offer both, with the page first and the download named plainly as a printable version.

Nobody objects to a file existing; they object to it being the only route to the information.

Give both and the objection disappears entirely.

What to change

1. Retype the menu as a page.
2. One page per menu.
3. Include the prices.
4. Keep the document as a download.
5. Remove old versions still linked.
6. Update the page, not the file.
7. Check it on a phone.

Step six is what keeps the fix working, since a business that updates the document and forgets the page is back where it started within a year.

The general version is covered in PDFs on a small business site.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.