Birds on the Brain

Michelle Jones was frustrated. Not angry, give-up frustrated, but motivated, energized frustrated. She had searched the Web for basic information about local restaurants for her popular blog, Consuming Louisville, and consistently run into walls. Some sites had PDFs with musical accompaniment. A few had text-based menus. She approached several restaurants about redesigning their Web pages and discovered that if Web design wasn’t the business’s primary concern, it showed on their websites. “It’s not the restaurants’ faults,” she was quick to explain.

“If it’s not your focus, it’s hard to know what you should and shouldn’t do.”

Once she realized that restaurants just didn’t have the capability to address the problem, she re-envisioned the solution: Instead of helping restaurants construct better Web pages, she focused on getting restaurant information to consumers.