If you build it, they will come - why every restaurant or bar must have a website

Considering that it's 2009, I don't think it's too much to ask for a business to have a website. Especially restaurants or bars. It's so easy to make a fairly decent site these days.

For a person with special dietary needs (a la vegetarian) or someone with more pressing concerns - like a food allergy, I think it's a common courtesy for an establishment to list their menu (yes, drink menu, too) online. I'm 99% more likely to visit a bar or restaurant that has at least made an attempt to post some information online. It shows that the business owner respects me and my need for information. Even if it's as basic as a MySpace profile with a picture of the bar and a badly scanned .pdf of a menu. (I also find Yelp reviews are helpful, but every person's perception of a business could be a little different.)

For those restaurants that already understand the importance of having a website, something else that I think is vital is keeping the content relevant. It's pretty disappointing when you look up a menu for an establishment, get excited for what you think you're going to order, and then actually find out that the menu you viewed online isn't anything like what's actually being used. That seems to happen more often than not. My final rant about restaurant/bar websites is nutritional information. I don't expect a mom and pop shop to list calorie counts. But for a huge chain (like, maybe Brio?), I fully expect to find information on what I'm eating. It actually scares me when a chain won't list nutrition information. It makes me feel like the food must be really fatty and awful if they can't even list numbers on a website. And if that's the case, they really don't deserve my money.