The restaurant website topic comes up frequently, and this is a frequent response. But there are two reasons it's clearly wrong:
1) Restaurants could jam their hours and menu onto a free theme for much less money than they spend getting a bespoke Flash monstrosity and be vastly more usable, yet do the latter anyway.
2) There are lots of cash-strapped small businesses around that don't have as uniformly unusable websites as restaurants.
I think you are both right, once you "de-identify" said resources and cash. That is, the constraint here is not cash but brains/skills/knowledge/time/effort. Many people simply don't know what is possible. I used to run continuously into this kind of problem when I worked for other people (guys who just don't know what is _possible_, not even talking about being able to do it).
> for much less money than they spend getting a bespoke Flash monstrosity
Actually, that Flash monstrosity with animations and music playing is the cheap option. You don't even need a coder to produce a website like that, just a designer (whereas you usually need at minimum a designer + a coder to build an HTML website). The thing about sucky websites is that they are made by sucky companies, and sucky companies are cheap! (Also many sucky websites are made by very good companies that just have no choice when a repeat client only has a pittance for a new site)
I work for a startup that sells to restaurants. This -- the money issue -- is what the sales guys who go into these places every day have told me when I asked them why they think the websites suck.
I trust their judgment, so we can just agree to disagree on this I suppose.
1) Restaurants could jam their hours and menu onto a free theme for much less money than they spend getting a bespoke Flash monstrosity and be vastly more usable, yet do the latter anyway. 2) There are lots of cash-strapped small businesses around that don't have as uniformly unusable websites as restaurants.
The issue is not money.