Why your menu should not be just a photo
Most trucks put their menu online the fastest way there is: a photo of the board, posted to Instagram or pinned on the profile. It takes ten seconds. It is also the version of your menu that the fewest people can actually use.
Keep the photo. Then type the menu out as plain words on a page, using the names your customers say out loud. It helps the person squinting at their phone in the sun, it helps the customer who uses a screen reader, and it gives search engines words instead of a picture of words.
Hungry people search for the food, not for you
Somebody who already knows your truck searches your name. Everybody else searches for what they want to eat: garlic shrimp, a plate lunch, poke, shave ice, and a town.
Google's own starter guide tells site owners to "think about the words that a user might search for". Your menu is the page where those words live. If the only copy of it is a photo, the words are only in the picture.
What Google actually says about pictures
To be fair to the photo: Google does try to understand images. Its image guide says it uses "alt text along with computer vision algorithms and the contents of the page" to work out what an image is about.
Look at what is on that list, though. Two of the three things are text you wrote. The same guide calls alt text "the most important attribute" for describing an image, and asks you to place images "near relevant text". Google is not promising to read the price of your fish tacos off a chalkboard in the glare. Typed words remove the guesswork.
The customers a photo leaves out
A person who uses a screen reader hears a photo of your menu as, at best, whatever description you gave it. Usually that is nothing.
A person with poor eyesight has a different problem. On a typed menu they can make the text bigger or change the colors. The web accessibility standard spells out why a picture does not allow that: "People cannot alter how text looks in images." That is also every customer reading a phone in full Maui sun.
What to actually type
Not a design project. A list, with the things people ask at the window before they order.
| For each item | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| The name people say | Write "garlic shrimp plate", not only the house name you gave it. You can keep both. |
| What is in it | One short line. It answers the question before somebody has to ask it. |
| The price | The real, current one. A stale price starts an argument at the window. |
| Vegetarian, gluten-free, spicy | Only if it is true. People with allergies check these first, and they check them carefully. |
| Whether it sells out | "Usually gone by 1" is useful. It gets people there earlier. |
There is a small bonus for you here too. When a price changes, you edit one line on your phone. You do not re-chalk the board, wait for the light, and re-shoot it.
Keep the food photos, and describe them
Photos of the food are some of the best things on any truck's page. The fix is not fewer pictures. It is a short, honest description on each one, called alt text, which is what Google calls the most important attribute and what a screen reader reads aloud.
Describe the plate the way you would to a friend on the phone. "Garlic shrimp over rice with mac salad" is good alt text. A string of search words with a town tacked on the end is not. Google's image guide says stuffing words in like that "may cause your site to be seen as spam", and it reads badly to the person listening to it.
If you only do one thing
Tonight, type your menu into a note on your phone: names, one line each, prices. That note is now the most useful version of your menu. Paste it wherever you have a page that you control.
If you do not have a page like that, that is the gap, and that part is what we do. You can see the sites we have built for Maui trucks first.
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