Nathan Parsons' Blog

It has always been hard for the little fish to compete in a sea of much larger, much richer fish, but the Internet was supposed to change all of that.  The restaurant industry has made modest use of the Internet to this point, but many small, family-owned restaurants still don’t have websites.  Enter the solution: urbanspoon.com. 

Of course most people reading this have been to urbanspoon, and it’s definitely not something new.  But the interest lies in what the growing urbanspoon community now provides to customers.  There are really only three things a restaurant needs on its own website: menu, pictures, and contact information.  With urbanspoon now providing menu information for many small restaurants that don’t have their own websites, the question is do these restaurants really need to spend the money to develop their own websites now?  If your brand ambassadors are strong, and with urbanspoon ranking high on Google when you search any type of restaurant, this type of website provides more rich, more accessable information than a website typically would.

Complicated branding and e-commerce such as online ordering will still require that restaurants have their own website, but the gap between family-owned restaurants and larger chain restaurants is shrinking.  It just goes to show that food is something many people are passionate about, and the development of a solid group of repeat customers and brand ambassadors is now, more than ever, the biggest key to any restaurant’s success.

http://www.urbanspoon.com/c/14/Vancouver-restaurants.html