National Restaurant Association Show – What a blast! 

 

Earlier this week, the National Restaurant Association held it’s annual NRA Show in Chicago. This renowned tradeshow attracted over 70,000 attendees, the majority of which work in the restaurant industry.
Of the 500 exhibitors split between the North and South Halls of the great McCormick Center, our team was on a mission to educate restaurant owners about why they should have a presence on the mobile web, as well as cook up fresh mobile sites for them on the spot.

Why Restaurants?

Google internal data tells us that 30% of all U.S. restaurant searches are done on mobile.  On Valentines Day, Google reported that this number more than doubled to 64%. The sad reality TechCrunch recently brought to our attention is that 95% of independent restaurants don’t have mobile sites. This breaks my heart.
The Duda Team sees that this is a problem and has an easy and affordable solution. We went to the show to educate restaurant owners on why their frilly Flash desktop sites and downloadable PDF menus had to go. I can’t tell you how sick I am of having to download a PDF menu to my phone then pinch and zoom my way through its contents to see what they’re serving.
With the promise of happy customers, we bedazzled conference attendees with our efficient click-to-call, mobile maps and OpenTable widgets.  We also preached mobile website design best practices by showing off features like the image slider and inline image cropping.
The show was a success! Here are a couple of our favorite mobile sites we “cooked up” at our booth:

But the best part of the show had to be all the fantastic food we got to sample. Take a look at these food wonders we saw while at the show. Beware, your mind will be blown!
Learn more about the National Restaurant Association and the NRA Show on Restaurant.org.

 

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