New Web site offers guide to dining in Herndon
By Kali Schumitz
If you have a question about Herndon restaurants, you will likely find the answer on herndoncuisine.com , a new Web site that compiles information about every restaurant in town.Webmaster Renee Markwood, 35, has lived in Herndon for 10 years and has always enjoyed dining in local restaurants with her boyfriend. She is also an oil painter and works as a graphics designer for Long & Foster.
She designed the site as a class project for a Web design class at Northern Virginia Community College but is already getting enough hits (about 35 a day) that she has decided to keep it available to the community.
The site offers three ways to find dining options from among more than 100 restaurants in Herndon—two interactive maps, one to search by location and one to search by type of food, and an alphabetical listing.
Markwood updates her listings daily but said it can be difficult to keep up with activity in the volatile restaurant industry.
"It's just a matter of driving around town and seeing what's new and what has closed," she said.
For example, since Markwood started working on the site in February, eight new restaurants have opened, with two more opening soon, and seven have closed.
Herndoncuisine.com also features a calendar of things to do in Herndon when you are not eating.
Markwood is trying to expand her site's offerings by allowing visitors to write reviews and submit information about events.
She is also offering services to restaurants that do not have their own Web sites and want to make menus and other information available online at what she said is a much more affordable price than full Web site hosting and design services. She expects to fund her site by selling these services and advertising.
But, even if she does not make a profit from it, Markwood has a good reason to keep working on her Web site: "It's fun."