|
| Brandon Zelasko |
No frills. Just the basics.
That’s what a locally based restaurant chain and its Web developer reached for when adapting a Web site for the small screens on wireless devices.
On mobile phones, screens range from small to tiny. While some devices pull in data at Wi-Fi speeds, others operate much more slowly on first and second generation cellular networks.
As a result, designing for mobile devices “really is an exercise in restraint,” said Brandon Zelasko, associate business manager for Red Door Interactive Inc.
Red Door recently spent two months retooling the Web site for Rancho Bernardo’s Garden Fresh Restaurant Corp. — which operates 105 eateries under the Souplantation and Sweet Tomatoes names in the West, South and East — optimizing the data for mobile phones. The new portion went live in mid-June.
Red Door and Garden Fresh executives declined to give the cost of the work.
Red Door says businesses could expect to pay $8,000 for a similar effort.
Customer feedback and a desire to reach out to new demographics prompted Garden Fresh to add the feature to its site, says spokeswoman Erika DiProfio. She added that the most traffic on the company’s full-sized Web site comes from people looking up store locations.
The Garden Fresh mobile Web site accesses the same database used by the full-sized Garden Fresh site, and retrieves a minimal amount of data: restaurant locations, maps, hours of operation and phone numbers. Clicking on a phone number will put through a call to the restaurant.
Users can search by state or ZIP code.
On The Go
The site is geared to people on the go who need a small amount of information quickly, rather than people in a chair, idly surfing the Internet.
The Starbucks coffee chain offers a similar site for mobile Web users.
