WARNING: This article contains foul language and strong opinions.

Alright, I’m hungry for some chicken and mad as hell.

I’ve seen this situation a lot in the restaurant industry; all flash sites with no added functionality other than sparkly graphics. This may possibly be the last segment of the internet to evolve into standards, semantics, and usability that’s worth a fuck. This isn’t just bad usability, this is a complete avoidance of it.

The site in question is Fridays.com, the half-assed effort of an online presence defecated by T.G.I. Friday’s. This site is supposed to represent the brand. It’s supposed to say something about T.G.I. Friday’s. On one hand, saying “we suck at everything we do” probably wasn’t their goal, but it’s what they’ve communicated clearly with their site. The very best translation in this context is “We don’t spend money where we need to.”, which could potentially weigh in on what their guests think of them. On the other hand, it could mean that all their effort goes into their food. I do love their food. Also, despite every Friday’s having that giant canoe shoehorned through several walls, the atmosphere is pleasant in the restaurant. In either scenario, a website is a presence that no business can afford to ignore nowadays.

In this review, I’m going to start by gnawing apart their website like I would a plate of their delicious Jack Daniel’s Chicken. I’ll follow that up by offering a tempting side order of “fix your fucking website”, in the form of hard-to-swallow reality and easy-to-chew common sense. Ready? Thought so.

The main page

After waiting at least 20 seconds on a broadband connection, the fridays.com homepage finally finished preloading and launched me into a knee-weakening all flash page. After getting over the unbridled anger of being marketed to like a fat kid on saturday morning, I had a moment of truth. A blinding realization; whoever created the T.G.I. Friday’s theme song sucks ass and should probably give up their idea of being successful in music. Yes, there is music playing on the main page of fridays.com.

The site is all-flash. This alone pisses me off, but I’m willing to get by if it’s something cheesy, like a bad movie site or a personal homepage. This is a business, though. Their goal is to reach people. No, their goal is to effectively communicate their available wares and how to get your grubby hands on their food.

So bad music and not knowing what the internet is for aside, they oraganized the page in such a fashion as to not make any sense to your eyeballs. You can’t tell if the column on the right is for marketing to you, or directing you to helpful areas. In reality, it’s for both. Scary that they would mix those together, but they did. Thankfully, there is at least a zip code box on the front page. I’m OK with them pushing their promos to me in the form of big juicy ads, but their front page is way too cluttered for it’s size. Not to mention, guys… red and black have never exactly been easy on the eyes in glowing-LCD-or-CRT format.

Staying on the main page, you can have a good laugh at the mouseovers on the menu. Welcome to 1998, Friday’s! Friday’s could do a much better job communicating their brand on their main page.

What I would fix on the main page

1. Ok, so the first fault is being all flash. See ya, flash. See ya, music. You’re now semantic XHTML and CSS.

2. Next up is that awful color scheme. I realize the restaurant colors are white, black, and red. But you can do better, Friday’s. I would change the background to white, with dark gray text, red for headings, various shades of gray and black for sub headings.

3. After that, some information structure. Most likely, the two most popular things on Fridays.com are the menu and the store locator. The store locator should be as prominent as you can get it. In the header. In the header on every page! The first thing on the main page could be a decent sized branding photo, maybe flanked by 3 mini menu suggestions.

   After that, a big promo graphic for the menu system. No questions. I wouldn’t suggest much below these things, but these are essential. Promote what people are looking for.

The Menu

Friday’s menu (imagine that, it has it’s own URL!) page isn’t much better. In fact, it’s worse.

We’ll start by addressing the overall approach. Friday’s assumes you want to look at a glossed over, germ infested brochure of a menu… like you get in a real restaurant. I suggest to them to look at the problem a little further back. Menu’s are about finding what you want! Not about paging through things categorized like “Ribs and More!”, “Shakers”, and “Steakhouse selects!”. Hell no. I’m after chicken. There’s not even a fucking chicken category in the menu.

The second thing I’d like to point out is the biggest god damn arrow I’ve seen on a website since… well, since ever. It starts on the right and contracts to the left, totaling out at about 700 pixels wide and 150 pixels tall. What’s so important? The dropdown flash piece that separates the menu into the aforementioned bullshit categories. Great going, Friday’s.

This is where shit gets really interesting. I was under the impression that this site was all flash. Turns out, I was wrong. The menu page is an attempt at valid XHTML and CSS, but falls flat on it’s face. First off, the text… as in all the text on the whole damn page… those are all images. I’ll repeat that for you. The reading-text on the page is composed of images. As in they put entire paragraphs into jpgs. Lovely. I think I just lost my appetite.

Further inspection of this monstrosity reveals that the markup is nothing more than a healthy serving of div soup. Semantics be damned! Everything shall be a div! And to make that more exciting, we’ll load the entire fucking menu on one page, and add several hundred lines of javascript to control the visibility of the divs! This way, the flash navigation can call javascript and change out the content of the page! Brilliant!

I think I’m gonna throw up.

What more can be said for this page? Seriously?

My suggestions for the menu page

Aside from the basic style upgrades I spoke of for the main page, this page needs some serious work. Nay, this section needs some serious work.

1. Eliminate this whole approach. Assume that your guests have some idea of what they want, and offer an alternative “browsing” option.

   The first thing I should see is a search box, and maybe even a link to an advanced search page. Why? Because I want chicken, god damnit, and there is no chicken to be mentioned in the category titles.

   The second thing I would offer is the traditional menu sections, each with a description and a picture. Fridays feels the need to pimp some menu items on the main page of the menu, but that’s a bad approach. I don’t care about those items. I’m here to find what *I* want, not what you want to sell me

2. Prices. Just as important as what I’m eating, is what it’s gonna cost me. Don’t beat around the bush. Tell me.

3. Nutrition. Don’t make me hunt! For the love of fuck, this is 2008! I want to know what I’m putting in my body!

Summary

Fridays.com was definitely dictated by business people who think they know how to make a website. Leave it to your web geeks, guys. They’re the experts… though after browsing your markup I’m not quite so sure they are… but none the less. Hire someone to do the job and let them do it.

Listen up, Friday’s’ people. (I’m not even sure if that was the correct grammar.) I’m at your website because I care about one thing. I want to find some god damned chicken. I don’t want to be marketed to or led around on a leash. I’m the customer. I want to find what I came to find. I realize you have things you want to sell me, and that’s fine. Please don’t let that get in the way of what I came to do.

Friday’s website is an abomination. I won’t even ask if I can build an order online, send it to the store and pick it up later. I won’t even ask about browsing the menu on my iphone (maybe even supply wifi so I can do so in the actual restaurant!). I won’t ask about CTRL+Fing the site to find keywords on the page. I won’t ask about any of that. Why? Because I’m too damn hungry. I’m gonna go get some Quizno’s.

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