Source material
The document people ask about most, published in the one form nothing can read
Menus, treatment lists, fee schedules, class timetables and tariff cards have one thing in common: they are designed objects, they are produced in design software, and they are put on the web as pictures of themselves. Text inside an image is not read, so the page that generates more questions than any other page you own arrives in the index containing a heading, a caption and no prices at all.
Why this one is harder than it looks
Nothing tells you it happened. The page was crawled successfully, it is listed as a source, and it has words on it: a title, some navigation, a line about booking. What it does not have is a single figure, because every figure is pixels. The assistant then declines the one question the page exists to answer, using the fallback wording the owner wrote, and the whole thing looks like a configuration problem rather than a missing document.
It is the most asked-about thing you publish. How much is it, what do you charge for, what comes with it, is there a smaller one. That is the traffic this document was made to serve, and every one of those questions arrives at a page that cannot answer it. The gap between how important the document is and how completely unreadable it is has no equivalent anywhere else in this category.
The picture costs you well beyond the assistant. Somebody using a screen reader gets nothing, so they cannot choose or order. Somebody on a phone gets an image they have to pinch and drag across because the text does not reflow. A search engine cannot match anybody on any dish, treatment or service you sell. And nobody in your own business can copy a line out of it to paste into a reply, which is why your team retypes prices into emails and occasionally retypes them wrong.
It also guarantees the prices are stale, by design. Changing one figure means opening design software, exporting again and replacing the file, so businesses patch instead: a note underneath saying some prices have changed, a second image for the new season left beside the old one, a sticker in the corner of the artwork. The result is two pictures and a sentence, and the sentence is the only part anything can read.
What it has to contain
Structure rather than wording. A passage pulled out of this document has to stand on its own, because that is the only form in which it will ever be read.
| Every line item as a line of text | The name, a short description of what it actually is, the price, and the unit, written out on the page. This is the version that gets indexed, matched and quoted. Whatever the page looks like, this has to exist in its text. |
|---|---|
| The small print in the artwork rewritten as sentences | Service charge, minimum spend, card surcharge, per person, per session, prices from, allergen note, whether tax is included. In the design these are set small at the bottom. In the text they are ordinary sentences beside the prices they govern. |
| One text list per site and per season, each naming itself | The venue or branch in the first line, and the period where prices vary by one. Two undated lists for two seasons are two competing answers with nothing in either of them to say which is current. |
| The image kept as a rendering, never as the source | The designed version stays for print, for the window and for social posts. The text version is what changes when a price changes, and the picture is regenerated from it or left off the page entirely. |
The rewrite, in order
Type it out once, and treat the typed version as the real document
This is an hour of dull work and it is the entire fix. Every item, every price, in text, on the page. Not as a caption, not in the alt attribute, not in a linked file, but as the content of the page a visitor reads.
The instinct to resist this is aesthetic, and it is worth naming so it can be argued with. A typed price list looks plainer than a designed one. It is also the only version that can be read aloud, searched, copied, quoted, corrected in thirty seconds, and answered from. The designed version becomes a rendering of it rather than the thing itself.
If the page genuinely cannot carry the text, publish the same list as a separate document and index that. What is not acceptable is leaving the only copy inside a picture, because that is indistinguishable from not publishing prices at all.
Write out the words the artwork was carrying
Designed price lists lean on layout the way a table does. A column heading over a group of figures. A size or portion column. An asterisk pointing at a line of small type. A tint behind a row meaning something the key at the bottom explains. All of that is meaning stored in position, and it disappears twice over here, once because it is a picture and once because layout does not travel into a passage.
So each of those becomes words attached to the item itself. The size in the line rather than in a column header. The surcharge in the sentence rather than behind a symbol. The group name repeated on each item rather than sitting above the group.
Do the same with anything the design implies. A section titled with a single word that only makes sense next to the photograph beside it needs a sentence saying what it is.
Describe each item, not only its name
A name on a menu or a code on a fee schedule shares almost no vocabulary with the question somebody types. They ask for something without dairy, something for a beginner, something that takes under an hour, the cheapest option for two people. None of those words appear in a list of names and figures.
Give each line a clause saying what it is: what it contains, who it suits, how long it takes, what is included in the price. This is the difference between a list that can be quoted when somebody names an item and a list that can answer somebody describing what they want.
It also gives the assistant something to do other than recite. A question about what is suitable for a particular need is answerable from descriptions and unanswerable from a column of prices, however accurately that column was transcribed.
Move the update path onto the text
Whoever changes prices has to change the text, and the design has to follow rather than lead. If the person with the design software is the only one who can edit the published list, the list will be out of date within a season and there is nothing anybody else can do about it.
Delete the old picture when the new list goes up. An outdated image is harmless to a matcher, since there is nothing in it to match, but the caption and the surrounding text are readable and they will keep asserting that this page is the current price list.
Then check the page the way a reader of text would: view the delivered source, or turn off images, and see whether the prices are still there. If they are not, nothing above has been done yet.
What happens if you skip it
The only readable thing on the page is the disclaimer under the picture
Somebody asks what you charge for the thing you are best known for. The price list page is indexed and a passage from it is retrieved, and that passage contains the page heading, a line about how to book, and the small note somebody added underneath the image saying that prices are correct at the time of printing and may be subject to change. That note is the most substantive readable sentence on the page, so it is what informs the answer. The customer is told, with a citation, that prices may vary.
What this costs is not one bad answer. It is that the single highest volume question you receive now goes to a person, every time, including at nine in the evening when there is nobody there, and a proportion of the people asking simply go and ask a competitor whose menu happens to be typed. The refusal is honest and the material was never there to answer from.
There is a quieter version too. Where the caption or a nearby paragraph mentions a headline figure that has since changed, the one number on the page that can be read is the wrong one, and it will be the number quoted.
Check it against this
Before you index it
- Every price appears as text in the page, not only inside the image
- Each item carries a short description of what it is
- Size, portion, surcharge and minimum spend are written into the lines they affect
- Each list names its site and, where it matters, its season
- The old image and its caption were removed when prices changed
- The page was checked with images off and the prices were still there
Questions
- Can I upload the image file itself instead of crawling the page?
- It will not help. Uploaded files are read page by page as text, and text that exists only as pixels is not read, so a picture of a menu uploads successfully and contributes nothing. The upload appearing in your list of sources is what makes this particular mistake so persistent.
- Our prices change weekly. Is a designed image not easier to maintain?
- It is the reason they are wrong. A text list is edited by whoever knows the new price, in a minute, from anywhere. A designed one is edited by whoever has the file and the software, which is a smaller group with other work, which is why the exported version on the site is a season behind.
- Could I put the prices in the alt text of the image?
- Alt text is a short description for somebody who cannot see the picture, not a container for forty lines of pricing, and stuffing it serves nobody well. Write the list on the page as ordinary text and let the alt text say what the picture is.
Keep reading
- How to write a pricing page an AI assistant can quote fromPrices that only exist in an interactive component are not in the text at all. How to publish pricing an assistant can quote without inventing.
- How to structure a shipping and delivery table an assistant can readA zone by service grid loses its meaning one row at a time. How to write delivery information that survives being split into passages.
- Publishing opening hours and locations an assistant answers correctlyThe easiest question to get wrong. Hours in an image, five stale copies, and kitchen times that differ from door times, all fixed at the source.
- Every kind of source materialWhat to feed an assistant, and the surgery each document needs first.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.