Global Top 10 for Digital Agencies
Digital Menus 2.0
Nobody can keep track of 5 different PDFs on their phone as they try and navigate your digital menu. Static sites are a far superior option for this.
As hotels and restaurants transition away from physical menus or certainly make them optional, the need for delivering the same content digitally has given rise to new challenges. Pre-COVID, menus were almost always designed with print in mind and usually were made digital by uploading the PDFs to the website. The interaction with these was relatively low, but the PDF served a purpose.
The downloaded PDF is however incredibly clunky and not a good option for the long term. Many restaurants have a separate drinks menu, à la carte, specials and more. It’s manageable if users are consuming this content on desktop, but we are now asking them to do it on their mobile devices at the table, which is really poor from a UX point of view.
Umi Labs has combined this problem with an increasingly popular technology called Static Sites. It takes input from a content management system such as WordPress but then builds an App-like experience on the web so that users can navigate a menu with speed, ease and much less frustration! You can read more about static site technology here.
We can use many different content management systems, but WordPress is a popular solution as it has an API that can be used as a source for the app.
Because Static Sites are ‘static’, there is no database look up when the page loads. This means that the site has to be ‘built’ each time the content changes. Don’t worry, this is an automatic process that turns your content and the designs into flat, superfast HTML and CSS.
Gatsby JS allows us to host and deploy an app that performs like a native app. It is also possible to download the website to your mobile devices, so it functions as an app as well! Great for returning guests.
Get in touch with our team, and we’ll set you up with a digital menu web app that is fully branded with a custom domain.
