“I like when the music blasts as soon as the site loads. It signals to everyone at work that I am going out to eat!”

“I hope the phone number and address are actually images so I can’t copy and paste them!”

I’ve always been surprised at how bad restaurant websites tend to be. I have a feeling that someone created a “great” circa-2001 restaurant site with intro movie, background music, hard-to-read script typefaces, and completely coded in Flash for that “cool, cutting-edge” effect. And every restaurant owner since has been copying that “website zero.” Meanwhile, actual visitors to the site can’t find the basic information they want: location, hours, phone number, and an easy-to-read (and up-to-date) menu. No amount of music, Flash, or “website ambiance” will reduce a user’s frustration. Instead, they’ll just find someplace else to eat.

Until restaurant owners build sites that their customers can use — and they realize that many of them are accessing their sites with mobile devices — the site Never Said About Restaurant Websites will have plenty of fodder. (via Daring Fireball)

What is sIFR? Basically it’s code that replaces plain HTML text on a web page with a small Flash movie that displays the text in any typeface you want. It works on any major browser with the Flash plug-in (which is nearly all web users) and sIFR degrades gracefully for the few that don’t, displaying the plain HTML text instead of the Flash text.

sIFR has been a great way for me to add style and personality to an otherwise all-HTML-text website. For sites I’ve built on a CMS — like barbarapeavey.com, craigrousseau.com and kieranchapmandesign.com — sIFR takes the site-owner-generated page titles and displays them in the selected typeface. This is such a timesaver over having to create or edit title images each time a change is made.

Alas, sIFR isn’t perfect: It’s use is pretty much limited to titles and subtitles; using it for body text would slow things down too much. Already it does slow down page load times a bit, as the page needs to first load before the Flash displays the title text. Also, while I’ve implemented it a number of times, it’s still not the easiest technology to get running correctly on a site. Besides setting up the script and styles, there’s often quirks and tweaking to get text to display correctly.

Until we’re given proper control over type on the web — perhaps TypeKit will be the answer? — sIFR has been a very good stopgap solution. For more information, as well as downloads, examples and documentation, check out sIFR Documentation & FAQ.