Put the hours, address, phone number and holiday changes on every page as plain text. Keep the Facebook feed lower down for photos and news, never as the only place they appear.

The site

A dim sum restaurant in a suburban shopping plaza, with round tables for ten, a private room upstairs and a queue out the door on weekend mornings.

Its website opens with a photograph of the dining room. There is a menu, scanned from the printed one into a PDF, a page about the chef, and a map.

The hours are on none of those pages. Neither are the daily specials, the banquet nights or the closures over the holidays.

All of that lives in a Facebook box in the right-hand column: the restaurant's page feed, embedded so the website would update itself whenever the staff posted.

A sensible idea on paper. Post once, appear in two places, and nobody has to learn to edit the website.

The inference a visitor makes

Somebody at a desk at half past eleven on a Tuesday wants two answers: is dim sum served on weekdays, and until what time.

They open the site and find a photograph, a menu that wants to download, and an empty grey rectangle where the feed should be.

The reasonable conclusions are that the site is broken, that nobody looks after it, or that the restaurant is closed. None of them ends in a booking.

A few people phone to ask. Most return to the results and pick a place whose hours they can read in a second.

Who never sees the box

The first is the one that costs this restaurant most. A group lunch with colleagues is decided at work, on a network where Facebook is often blocked, and there the box shows nothing.

Hours are not news

Even where the box loads, it shows the newest posts first. The regular hours were posted once, months ago, and now sit beneath weeks of dumpling photographs and a Valentine's set menu.

Finding them means scrolling inside a small box inside a page, which on a phone usually scrolls the page instead.

Hours are reference information, the same tomorrow as today. Reference information belongs on the page itself, as text anyone can read at a glance.

A dim sum restaurant has more of it than most: dim sum hours, dinner hours, the day it closes, and whether it takes bookings for the weekend rush.

The site and the listing disagree

Search engines read the restaurant's own pages. The feed is a window onto Facebook rather than part of those pages, so as far as Google can tell, the website says nothing about opening hours.

The Google listing has hours of its own, entered when it was verified and since changed by somebody's suggested edit. The Facebook page has a third version in its About section.

Three places, three sets of hours. A visitor who notices trusts none of them, and one who does not trusts whichever they saw first.

A worked example

Over Lunar New Year the restaurant closed for two days so the staff could be with their families. The manager posted the closure on Facebook a week ahead, and it duly appeared in the box.

The Google listing still showed the usual hours, because nobody thought to change it. The website showed no hours at all to anybody whose phone or office blocked the feed.

On the first morning, families who had planned a holiday dim sum arrived at a locked door. Two of them left reviews about the wasted trip.

The closure had been announced properly. The trouble was where the announcement lived, and that it lived in only one place.

The repair was mostly text. The hours now sit at the top of every page, split into dim sum and dinner, with a short line above them for holiday changes, kept by the same person who posts on Facebook.

The Google listing was corrected that day, and changing it is now part of every closure. The feed moved to the foot of the home page, beside a plain link to the Facebook page.

Specials and banquets scroll away

The feed is built for this week. A post about the private room, the banquet set menus or the deposit for a wedding dinner is visible for a few days, then buried.

Those are the most valuable enquiries a restaurant like this gets: a family planning a sixtieth birthday for eighty guests, or a company booking its year-end dinner.

They want a page they can find again, with the room's capacity, sample menus with prices per table, the deposit and a number to call. A post from October is not that page.

What belongs on the page as text

The hours, split by service where they differ, with the closed day named rather than left out.

The address, which plaza entrance to use and where to park.

The phone number, set up so that one tap dials it.

Whether bookings are taken, and for which sittings. And the menu as a web page that loads quickly and reads without zooming.

The counter-case within the site

The Facebook page is worth keeping. It is where the regulars are, it shows the restaurant is busy, and posting there is easier than editing a website.

A restaurant whose hours never change, and whose customers mostly follow the page already, loses less to the box than this one did.

What it cannot do is hold anything a visitor needs in order to decide. Hours, address, phone, menu and bookings go on the page as text, and the feed sits beneath them.

What to change

  1. Put the hours in text on every page.
  2. Split dim sum and dinner hours clearly.
  3. Add a line for holiday changes with dates.
  4. Match the Google listing to the website.
  5. Give banquets a page of their own.
  6. Replace the PDF menu with a web page.
  7. Move the Facebook box below the essentials.

Step four is the one that would have saved the holiday. Most people see the Google listing before the website, and when the two agree, a visitor can stop checking and come in.

Other details that tell visitors nobody is minding a site are covered in the footer still says copyright 2013.

Frequently asked questions

Why does the Facebook box show nothing?

Office networks often block Facebook, content blockers on iPhones and privacy add-ons strip its code, and weak signals time out. In each case visitors see an empty space.

Can Google read hours inside the feed?

No. The feed is a window onto Facebook rather than part of the restaurant's own pages, so as far as search engines can tell, the website says nothing about hours.

Should the restaurant stop posting on Facebook?

No. The page is where regulars follow specials and news, and posting there is easy. It simply cannot be the only place hours, menus and bookings appear.

Where should the hours go on the site?

At the top of every page as plain text, split by service where dim sum and dinner differ, with the closed day named and a short line for holiday changes.

How should holiday closures be handled?

Announce them in three places at once: on the site above the regular hours, on the Google listing, and on Facebook. Then restore the usual hours afterwards.

Is a PDF menu good enough?

Not on its own. A scanned PDF downloads slowly on phones and needs zooming to read, while a menu as a web page loads quickly and can be found by search engines.

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.

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