haversian's Friends

muramoto.biz: Awesome restaraunts; terrible website.

I really like Sushi Muramoto and Restaurant Muramoto. The food is great and both places, and I recommend them. It's a shame that their website, muramoto.biz, is an embarassment.

The first thing I notice is that the text is really small. Smaller than I'm comfortable reading. To make it worse, the text is lower contrast; a dark grey instead of black. The sidebar with contact information and times is even worse, a medium grey. Normally my browser will force fonts to never be too small, but this is Flash, so it ignores my preferences. This is a typical case of a young designer with good eyes and a high quality screen being ignorant of the needs of real-world users. It sends a message of, "If you have poor eyesight, you're not welcome."

Again, thanks to the Flash implementation, some of the text cannot be selected and copied. First, this eliminates a coping mechanism for hard to read text: I can't copy it and paste it into a text editor with large fonts. Secondly, it eliminates a common technique: copying the address and pasting it into Google Maps, or just selecting it, right clicking, and picking, "Search Google for '225 KING ST'".

If you need Muramoto's address or phone number on the go, you better hope that Google knows it, because muramoto.biz won't be able to help. As an all-Flash site, most web-enabled cell phones, including the popular iPhone, are completely unable to visit.

As I'm sitting here typing this, the constant changing of the large image ever 5 or so seconds is driving me mad. Again, in my normal web browser I could hit Esc to stop a GIF animation, but I can't do anything here.

The site implements custom scrollbars, and like most custom scrollbars they're garbage. As with all too many of these custom monstrosities, you don't click, you just hover over the arrow. The scroll speed is fixed; there is no way to go faster to skim. Scrolling through the entire dinner menu will take 30 seconds, period. If you want to jump to the dessert section, it will take at least 20 seconds. There is no elevator to allow quick movement, no area to click on to move by a page at a time. The arrow keys don't move a line at a time. Thankfully, page up and down will jump by a page at a time. The scrollbar also erroneously keeps the scroll location when changing pages. Go to "KEY STAFF", then scroll to the bottom of Muramoto's bio as though you had read it. Now click on any other name to the left. Observe that you're still at the bottom and now need to scroll up to read it properly.

With the garbage scrolling system, happily there is a "PRINT" option for the dinner menu. It leads to http://muramoto.biz/pdf/rm_menu.pd, which is promising. Unfortunately it's "404 Error - Not Found". The help text below has clearly never been customized and thus is wildly inappropriate for a professional site. For extra fun, the error frames an advertising site below; nothing helps show how classy Muramoto's restaurants are like advertising for insurance!

The directions page is laughable. The "Directions" aren't. The map is very stylized and useless to anyone not already familiar with downtown Madison. There is no information on nearby parking, essential in downtown Madison. Again, the address remains unselectable. "PRINT" links to Google Maps, which is good, but not quite what I'd expect "PRINT" to do.

If I'd like to link to a specific page; perhaps the directions, I'm out of luck. The best I can do is link to the front page, then describe what to click.

On the more nit-picky side, the source code for the web page has a bunch of unused JavaScript code. While basically harmless, it suggests a sloppiness.

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