Richmond BizSense reported today that a Shockoe Bottom restaurant and night spot shut its doors this week, citing the economy. I can’t say with any authority whether that is or isn’t the case having never been there myself, but I figured I’d take a look at their web presence to see what they were doing and what could have been improved from a marketing standpoint.

Online reviews looked decent, and lots of decent restaurants manage to survive in this economy. What I found more interesting was their website. Its presentable and has all the information required, but its effectiveness as a promotional tool is limited. Its one of those budget website deals, where you pay a company a low monthly fee to host, and they provide you with software and you piece the site together yourself. The problem is, the site doesn’t get built to web standards, and its difficult for search engines to find your site. I Googled “restaurants shockoe bottom” and didn’t see a listing before I gave up after page 7 of the results. Without going into too much detail, certain techniques and bits of code (robots.txt, XML sitemaps, valid W3C) are required to make any site “search-engine friendly”. Unfortunately, the website in question was built with a disregard for nearly all of these standards. When you are choosing to have a new site built you need to keep these things in mind when someone presents you with a cheap price, it should be common knowledge at this point that the cheapest is hardly ever the right way to go. Something as important as your website shouldn’t be risked in this new information economy. What does it matter if you saved a few hundred dollars up front when you lose thousands in the end.

The website also lacked proper tie-ins to social media. They had a pretty active Facebook page, but getting to it through the site was a bit of an ordeal. Search engines like social media, and activity on Facebook, Twitter, et al, helps your site get found. Also, their dining menus were in .doc format, which is a little annoying and completely unreadable to search engine spiders as well as impatient diners trolling the bottoms’ restaurant selection while walking around.

I really can’t say that having a site built to web standards would have saved their business, because there are many other factors at play, and its easy for a restaurant to get lost down in the Bottom. But their site probably wasn’t helping them the way it should have.