Restaurant website design comes down to three jobs: show the menu, take the booking, and say when you are open. Everything else, the photos, the story, the fonts, sits on top of those three and cannot make up for one of them being wrong. Designing a restaurant website usually starts with how it looks. This piece starts with what twenty real ones actually decided. On 11 September 2026 we checked eighteen restaurants, pubs and cafes across six Irish towns, plus two in London, against one fixed checklist, and compared the Irish sites’ opening hours against their own Google listings on the same day.
The biggest difference between them was not the design. It was who holds the booking, and often who holds the whole website: the restaurant, a booking platform, or a takeaway ordering app. And the answer follows the type of place almost exactly. Before a diner reaches any of those websites, though, many meet the restaurant first on Google Maps, so we checked that as well: the top twenty Maps results for “restaurants” in each of the same six towns, 120 listings in all.
What is a restaurant website for? It depends what kind of place you are
A fine-dining room, a neighbourhood restaurant, a pub and a coffee shop are four different businesses that happen to share a kitchen, and their websites have almost nothing in common. Here is what each type did in our review.
Fine dining. All five took bookings online, all five sold gift vouchers, and their homepages carried very little text, letting the pictures do the work. People plan these meals weeks ahead and spend real money on them, so the site’s job is the booking and the expectations around it. Chapter One in Dublin publishes the date each two-month block of its reservation diary opens, well into 2027, which answers the question every regular has before they ask it. Bastion in Kinsale states its terms before you book: one tasting menu, no changes for allergies or dislikes, and a cancellation charge inside 72 hours.
The everyday restaurant. All four took bookings online and three of four sold vouchers. The menus are organised by sitting: lunch, early evening, the weekend. The Vintage Kitchen in Dublin runs a separate menu page for each sitting and puts its bring-your-own-wine nights up front.
The pub. One of four took table bookings online. The others take them the old way: The Front Door in Galway asks you to call into the bar, ring or email. Pub sites sell a night out rather than a table: music, sport, parties, whiskey. Kyteler’s Inn in Kilkenny does not book tables online at all, but sells bookable food, drink and music experiences instead.
The cafe. None of the five took table bookings. Two cafes’ entire websites are takeaway ordering apps, one runs its menu as a weekly click-and-collect order line, one is a holding page with a name and an address, and The Brasserie Sligo welcomes walk-ins and asks larger groups to get in touch first.
Every one of those is a sensible decision for the business behind it. Before anyone designs anything, decide which of the four you are. A cafe that builds a fine-dining site gets a booking system nobody uses, and a restaurant that builds a cafe site sends its bookings to the phone at the busiest hour of the night. For the cafe and the pub that live on walk-ins, there is a second point: new customers often find them on Google Maps long before they see the website.
Local SEO for restaurants: how diners find you on Google Maps
Local SEO for restaurants is the work of making sure your restaurant shows up when diners search Google for somewhere to eat: on Google Maps, and in the map of three places that appears near the top of the results. In Ireland, “restaurants near me” is searched around a million times a month, “coffee near me” around 300,000 times, “pubs near me” around 135,000 and “breakfast near me” around 90,000, on Google’s own keyword estimates, read in September 2026, which round heavily and group close variants together. A “near me” search is made on the spot, by someone deciding where to go, and if your restaurant is not on that map it is not in the running. The phrase “local SEO for restaurants” is searched about ten times a month. Diners search in huge numbers, and owners almost never search for the fix.
Google says three things decide who shows up, in its own words:
- Relevance: “how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for”
- Distance: “how far each business is from the customer who’s searching”
- Prominence: “how well-known a business is”, based on “info like how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have” To see what that looks like in practice, we took Google Maps’ top twenty results for “restaurants”, centred on each of the six towns in our review, on 11 September 2026: 120 places in all. Every one of the eighteen places in the top three across the six towns had a profile claimed by the business, and seventeen of the eighteen linked a website; the eighteenth linked a Facebook page. Across all 120, 104 had both a claimed profile and a linked website, 119 showed opening hours, and 58, about half, had a button to book a table straight from the listing. Only four were rated under four stars, and the typical place had around 600 reviews. Distance matters too: in Kilkenny, the top result had just 33 reviews, which fits what Google says about how close the diner is. What you can control is making sure nothing on your listing is holding you back.
Where the website comes in. The Google Business Profile does the first job. The website is what that profile points at when a diner taps for more, and it is part of the prominence Google measures, because when a guide, a newspaper or a local directory links to a restaurant, it links to the website. Thirteen of the eighteen Irish profiles in our review carried a Menu button and eight a Reserve button, each opening a page on a website. When those pages drift, the listing sends diners somewhere wrong:
- On one starred restaurant’s profile, the Menu button opens a page with no menu on it, only an old notice about re-opening
- On one pub’s profile, the Menu and Reserve buttons go through an old web address and land on the homepage rather than the menu
- On one restaurant’s profile, the Reserve button ends on the booking platform’s own guide page, with its own reviews and its own set of opening hours
Two of the eighteen profiles were not claimed by the business, which means the owner cannot directly correct what Google shows.
The practical list for a restaurant:
- Claim your Google Business Profile and keep it in your own name, not a former manager’s or an agency’s
- Choose the category that matches how people search for you: the eighteen Irish places in our review ranged from “Fine dining restaurant” and “Seafood restaurant” to “Gastropub” and “Cafe”
- Keep the hours right, holidays included, and the same as your website
- Point the Menu and Reserve buttons at pages that work and open the right thing
- Ask for reviews and answer them. Every one of the eighteen Irish places in our review rated 4.5 or higher on Google, so in a busy town a good rating gets you considered rather than chosen; in Google’s words, replying “shows that you value their feedback”
- Add your own photos. The profiles in our review carried between 22 and 4,788 photos, and the ones you post yourself are the ones you get to choose; Google’s own advice is to use them to “show customers what you offer”
That is the core of local SEO for a restaurant, and the profile claimed and set up properly in your own name is part of what we mean by digital foundations. The rest of this piece is about making sure the website those buttons open is worth the tap.
Who holds the booking?
Across the eighteen Irish places in our review, bookings ran five different ways, and that choice shaped each site more than any design decision did.
| How bookings work | Places | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| A booking system embedded in your own website | 7 | Guests book without leaving your site; the platform runs underneath |
| Your site links out to the platform’s booking page | 1 | Simplest to set up; the booking happens on someone else’s page |
| The booking platform builds and hosts the whole website | 2 | Booking, menu and hours in one system; the site moves if the platform does |
| Phone, email, walk-in, or no table bookings | 6 | Nothing to pay for, and somebody has to answer |
| The website is a takeaway ordering app | 2 | Built for orders, not tables |
The platforms in use were TablePath, ResDiary, OpenTable and TableAgent. TablePath also builds complete restaurant websites, and two places in the sample, Aniar in Galway and Kirbys at The Whale’s Tail in Clonakilty, run their whole site on it. That is a real trade-off in both directions. Everything lives in one place, so the booking, the menu and the opening hours are managed together. The site is also tied to the platform, so changing booking system later means changing websites too. Worth knowing before you sign, not a reason to avoid it.
For a lot of diners the booking starts on Google, not on your website. About half of the 120 Maps listings we checked had a button to book a table straight from the listing, and some booking systems plug into it directly: the Google listings for Bastible and The Vintage Kitchen open their booking systems from Google itself. When you compare platforms, ask whether yours does that, because that button sits exactly where the on-the-spot searches land.
I have worked in restaurants and hotels, several of them, during university and before it, and none of this existed then. Everything was done by hand. Somebody had to be on the phones constantly and keep the bookings folder up to date, and at the weekends and through the summer months that was a lot of work. That was a long time ago and a lot has changed since. But having done it by hand, I can imagine the ease of a system that does it for you: nothing lost in a folder, the booking finished without a phone call, the reminders sent automatically. It will never fully replace the phone, which is still a key way to reach people. Used alongside it, I imagine it makes life a lot easier.
No-shows are the other half of this. The Restaurants Association of Ireland told the Irish Times in January 2018 that in the average restaurant between 15 and 20 per cent of Christmas bookings were no-shows. In May 2026, OpenTable told the Irish Times that restaurants using deposits or prepaid experiences saw 19 per cent fewer no-shows than standard bookings. That second figure is the platform’s own, not an independent measure, but it points the same way as the two fine-dining places in our sample that state their card and cancellation terms on the booking page. Campagne in Kilkenny takes card details to secure a table, and says so before you start.
One thing gets missed when a platform takes the booking. The guest’s name, email and visit history sit in the platform. Only three of the eighteen Irish homepages offered a newsletter or mailing-list sign-up. If you want to be able to tell last year’s Christmas parties that bookings are open, that list has to live somewhere you control, which is a problem we wrote about in where customer details go missing, and what our email and CRM setup is for.
The menu: text page, PDF or ordering page?
Of the eighteen Irish sites, nine publish the menu as a text page, four as PDFs, three as an ordering page, and two have no menu online at all.
The advice every website builder and booking platform gives is that PDF menus are bad because Google cannot read them. That part is wrong. Google lists PDF as a file type it indexes, and every menu PDF we downloaded, from every site that used them, contained real text rather than a scanned picture. The costs of a PDF menu are different ones:
- Every one we opened was laid out at print size, A4 or A3, so on a phone it is a table-sized page viewed through a keyhole
- They ranged from about 0.1 to 2 MB each, which is a lot to load for a lunch menu on a patchy signal
- Many carry a date in the file name, so the menu’s age is on public view
A date in the file name cuts both ways, and the sample shows both. The Harwood Arms in London publishes its menu as a PDF with the date in the file name, and the one for Friday 11 September 2026 was on its server by 10:23 GMT that morning. For a kitchen whose menu changes that often, a dated file is exactly right. At the other end, four sites in our review still link a menu labelled more than a year old: menus labelled March 2024, a wine list from January 2023, two whiskey lists from October 2023, a drinks menu from July 2025. A label is not proof the list is wrong, because a whiskey list can stay true for years. It is still what a diner sees.
The clearest upkeep finding in the whole review came from the same habit. On one restaurant’s site, the breakfast menu link in the main navigation opens an older file that has since been deleted, so it returns an error page, while the menus page itself links the current one. Two different versions of another menu are live on the same site at once, one in the navigation and a newer one on the page. Somebody updated the menu in one place and not in the other. Nobody did anything wrong, exactly. The site simply had two copies of the same link and nobody whose job it was to check both.
The menu page is also often the first page of your site a diner ever opens, because thirteen of the eighteen Google profiles in our review link straight to a menu. For most restaurants the practical answer is a plain web page for each standing menu: lunch, dinner, Sunday, drinks. It fits a phone, it changes in minutes, and every dish is written as text that search can match against what people actually type. Gallagher’s in Cork puts its whole menu on the page as text, with an allergen number against every dish. Keep the daily specials for the board and for Instagram, which is what they are good for.
Allergens. The Food Safety Authority of Ireland requires allergen information for non-prepacked food to be given in writing at the point of presentation, sale or supply, covering fourteen allergens, under S.I. No. 489 of 2014 as updated by S.I. No. 656 of 2024. For a dine-in restaurant that point is the restaurant, not the website. It changes the moment you take orders online or by phone for delivery or collection: for that, the FSAI says the allergen information must be available before the order is completed and again at delivery. Six of the eighteen Irish sites in our review mark allergens on the dishes in their online menus. That is what the FSAI’s own pages say, read on 11 September 2026, and not legal advice.
Opening hours: does your website agree with your Google profile?
Most restaurant websites agree with their Google profile, but not all of them. Fourteen of the eighteen Irish sites state their opening hours. Nine were consistent with their own Google Business Profile on the day we checked, two differed by half an hour or less, and three disagreed by more than that, on the days or the times. Two sites give no hours at all, while Google shows hours for both. On Maps, hours are almost universal: 119 of the 120 listings we checked showed them, so they are the first thing a diner standing on the street sees, before your website ever loads.
What we cannot tell you is which side was wrong in those three cases, and the reason is worth knowing. One of the clearest mismatches sits on a Google profile the business has never claimed. The owner may have been updating the website faithfully while an old listing they do not control carries on saying something else. The usual assumption is that owners update Google and forget the site. That happens, and so does the reverse. The honest version is that nobody’s hours are being checked in two places.
Google is the one doing the work here. Structured data is the part of a site’s code that hands facts like opening hours straight to search engines and AI answer tools. Only two of the eighteen Irish sites declare their hours that way, and they are the two takeaway ordering apps, whose platform adds it automatically. None of the sixteen other sites does, including every custom build, yet Google had hours for all eighteen from their Business Profiles. For hours, the profile is doing the job the websites’ code is not.
Because the profile carries your hours to Google, three things follow:
- Claim your Google Business Profile and keep it in your own name, which is part of what we mean by digital foundations
- Give one person the job of changing the hours in both places on the same day, bank holidays included
- Put your hours on the site as plain text, in the same wording as the profile, and in the code as well, which is the groundwork for local SEO and for turning up in AI answers
Social media for a restaurant: letting Instagram keep the site fresh
Instagram is where most restaurants actually post, and your website can show it. Fourteen of the eighteen Irish sites link to an Instagram account. None of the eighteen homepages shows a live feed of those posts, and one site has an Instagram feed plugin installed with nothing showing on its homepage. So the link sits on almost every site, and the posts themselves never reach it.
The Brasserie Sligo’s own FAQ is the most honest line in the sample on this. For bank-holiday hours, it tells visitors to check its Facebook or Instagram before they come, because that is where the up-to-date information goes. Plenty of owners would recognise that. The daily special, the new dessert, the gig on Saturday and the early closing on Monday all go up on Instagram in a minute, from a phone, between services. Changing the website means finding the login.
So use that habit rather than fighting it. There are two ways to connect them.
- Show the feed on the site. A feed embedded on the homepage or an events page means a new post appears on the website as soon as it goes up on Instagram. The site looks alive, because it is.
- Post once, publish everywhere. A scheduling tool can put one post on Instagram and Facebook together, planned a week ahead, so the specials and events go out on time even on the nights nobody has a spare minute.
Photos of this week’s specials belong on your Google profile too, where the people searching “near me” will see them before they see anything else you have made.
The honest limit: a feed only keeps the site fresh if somebody keeps posting, and it does not replace the menu, the hours and the booking link written as text. Most feeds load after the rest of the page, so search engines may never see them. The feed carries what changes this week, and the page carries what is true every week.
Keeping the profiles going is its own job: planning the posts, getting them out on time, and answering the messages that arrive at eleven at night. That is what our social media management covers, with the words and photos themselves coming from content creation. Where the same post needs to reach three places without anyone copying it across, that is a small, useful job for automation.
Who keeps it right?
A restaurant website goes out of date faster than most, because the business behind it changes every season. Four sites in our review showed what that looks like when nobody is looking after it:
- A restaurant site still carrying the platform’s default tagline in its page title, a booking button that points to the web host’s staging address, and a casino spam link injected into the homepage code, which is the usual sign of a site that has been compromised
- A cafe page whose social media icons link to the website builder’s own Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts, left over from the template
- A pub site that only loads over an unsecured connection, because the certificate on its secure address has expired
- A site whose navigation still carries a Covid-19 page
We are naming none of them. Every one is a real business that is open. Most of it is left behind by whoever built the site, and none of it is expensive to prevent. It is what a site looks like when launch day was treated as the end of the job.
We look after the website of the Sherkin Island painter Majella O’Neill Collins, and the rhythm there is a useful model. We update it once or twice a year, depending on how much new work there is, plus a dedicated page for each exhibition when one comes up. What makes that work is not the updating itself. It is keeping everything that needs to go on the site gathered in one place as it happens, so when the update comes, it is done in one sitting instead of a week of chasing photos and wording. A restaurant’s version of the same thing is a folder for the new menus, the Christmas hours and the summer opening times, emptied onto the site and the Google profile on the same fixed day, so the two never drift apart. On our set-price sites, those changes come to us rather than to a login someone has to remember, and ongoing maintenance is the same idea run month to month.
The twenty places at a glance
The table lists all twenty places in the review, eighteen in Ireland and two in London, with how each one publishes its menu, where its booking goes, and the decision that stands out on its site. Among the Irish eighteen, the booking route followed the type of place: every fine-dining room and restaurant booked online, one pub in four did, and none of the cafes took table bookings.
| Place | Type | Menu online | Booking | The decision |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aniar (Galway) | Fine dining | Text page, written as a story | TablePath, whole site | Site, menu and booking on one platform |
| Bastible (Dublin) | Fine dining | Text page | OpenTable, embedded, or email | Online or email only, no phone number on the booking page |
| Bastion (Kinsale) | Fine dining | PDFs | ResDiary, embedded | Terms stated before you book |
| Campagne (Kilkenny) | Fine dining | Text page per menu | ResDiary | Card details taken, and said so up front |
| Chapter One (Dublin) | Fine dining | Text pages | ResDiary | Diary opening dates published a year ahead |
| The Vintage Kitchen (Dublin) | Restaurant | Text page per sitting | TableAgent, embedded | Bring-your-own-wine nights up front |
| Brasserie on the Corner (Galway) | Restaurant | PDFs, dated by month | ResDiary, embedded | Every menu is a dated file |
| Rive Gauche (Kilkenny) | Restaurant | Text page | TablePath page, shared with its sister venue | One booking page for two restaurants |
| Kirbys at The Whale’s Tail (Clonakilty) | Restaurant | Text page with allergen key | TablePath, whole site | Specials left to the server |
| Ella’s Heaven (Dublin) | Cafe | The ordering page | None, takeaway and delivery | The website is the ordering app |
| A Cork cafe | Cafe | None | None | A holding page |
| The Brasserie Sligo | Cafe | Text page with allergen key | Walk-ins | Sends visitors to Instagram for holiday hours |
| Lyons Cafe (Sligo) | Cafe | Weekly click-and-collect page | None | The menu is a weekly order line |
| Daily Dose (Clonakilty) | Cafe | The ordering page | None, takeaway and delivery | The website is the ordering app |
| Gallagher’s (Cork) | Pub | Full text, allergen number per dish | TablePath, embedded | The whole menu as searchable text |
| The Front Door (Galway) | Pub | PDFs | Phone, email or at the bar | Sells nights out and parties |
| Kyteler’s Inn (Kilkenny) | Pub | A3 PDFs | Bookable experiences, not tables | Music and history over table bookings |
| A Sligo pub | Pub | None | Phone | A one-screen contact card |
| The Harwood Arms (London) | Pub | A dated PDF every day | OpenTable, embedded | The menu is republished daily |
| e5 Bakehouse (London) | Cafe | None on the homepage | Classes, not tables | Sells the classes and the shop |
How we reviewed these sites
Twenty places, eighteen in Ireland and two in London, drawn from Google search results in six Irish towns, the Michelin-starred list taken in order, and two chosen UK sites, checked on 11 September 2026 in a desktop browser. Opening hours were compared with each place’s Google listing on the same day. The sample leans toward places that already have a website, and a menu or hours read from outside cannot say what the kitchen changed that morning. It informs the argument; it does not supply statistics.
The towns were Dublin, Cork, Galway, Kilkenny, Sligo and Clonakilty, searched for restaurants, cafes and pub food, taking the first independent business in each set of results with its own website. Chains, takeaway-only businesses and hotel restaurants without a site of their own were left out. We have never worked for any of these places. The Google Maps check took the top twenty results for “restaurants” centred on each town on the same day; Maps positions change with exactly where the searcher is standing, so treat them as a snapshot, not a ranking. Search volumes are Google’s own keyword estimates for Ireland, read in September 2026. We ran the same review on nineteen construction firms and nineteen plumbers, and each trade came out differently.
A ten-minute check of your own site
Six checks, each one a finding from this review, that you can run on your own phone tonight:
- Find yourself on Google Maps. Stand outside and search “restaurants near me”, or “cafe near me” or “pubs near me”, whichever fits you. Are you on the map? Tap your listing and try the Website, Menu and Reserve buttons: each should open the right page.
- Open every menu link. Including the ones in the main menu, not just on the menus page. Each one should open, and each should be the menu you are serving now.
- Compare your hours with Google. Open your own site and your own Google listing side by side. If they disagree, find out which one is wrong and whether you can change it. If you cannot, your profile may not be claimed.
- Tap “Book”. Follow it all the way to a confirmed table. It should land somewhere that takes the booking, not on a page that no longer exists.
- Look for leftovers. Your page title in the browser tab, your social icons, a page from 2020 still in the menu.
- Check your Instagram is linked, and that the last post is newer than the newest thing on your website.
If all six pass, your site is doing its job and you do not need anyone for this. If some fail, most of them are small fixes rather than a rebuild, and they are the kind of thing we fix. If you are starting from nothing, a restaurant website built around your menu and your bookings is what we do, and our guide to what a website costs in Ireland sets out the prices before you ask.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a website for my restaurant?
Most restaurants do, but for a narrower reason than people assume. Your Google Business Profile already carries your hours, your phone number and your photos, and in our review Google had opening hours for all eighteen Irish places we checked. What the profile does not give you is a booking route you control, a menu laid out your way, somewhere to sell gift vouchers, and room for the story of why someone should pick you over the place next door. Those are the things people look for before they commit to an evening, and they are what a website is for. A cafe that runs on walk-ins can get by with very little: a page with the menu, the hours and the address, kept current. A restaurant that takes bookings weeks ahead needs more, because the site is where the booking, the terms and the menu live together. The one version that does harm is a site nobody looks after, saying something different from Google.
How much does it cost to create a website for a restaurant?
With us, a single-page site is €700 before VAT, ready in about 5 working days once we have your content. That is enough for a cafe or a pub that needs a menu, hours, directions and a phone number in one place. A site of up to five pages is €1,500 before VAT, ready in about 10 working days, and suits a restaurant with several menus, private dining, events or vouchers to show. A booking system is usually scoped and quoted as a custom build before any work starts, though moving an existing one across from an old website may fit the five-page price, with basic setup included. Booking platforms and ordering apps charge their own fees on top, which vary by plan, so check each one's own pricing page. The cost that varies most between restaurants is not the design. It is how many menus you run and how often they change, because that decides how much looking after the site needs.
Should a restaurant menu be a PDF?
A PDF menu is not the search problem it is often said to be. Google lists PDF as a file type it indexes, and every menu PDF in our review of twenty restaurant websites contained real text rather than a scanned image. The real costs of a PDF are elsewhere. Every one we opened was laid out at print size, A4 or A3, so on a phone the diner has to pinch and scroll around a page designed for a table. Many carry a date in the file name, which puts the menu's age on public view, and a file that is replaced but still linked from another page becomes a dead link. A menu written as a plain web page avoids all three: it fits the screen, it can be changed in minutes, and each menu can have its own address. If your kitchen changes the menu daily, a dated PDF is a sensible habit. If it changes twice a year, a page is better.
What are the best reservation systems for restaurants?
There is no single best one, and we sell none of them, so the useful question is which kind suits you. In our review of eighteen Irish places, seven embedded a booking system inside their own website, one linked out to the platform's own booking page, two had their whole website built and hosted by the booking platform, and six took bookings by phone, email or not at all. The platforms we saw in use were TablePath, ResDiary, OpenTable and TableAgent. When comparing, ask four things. Does the booking happen on your own site or on the platform's page? Who keeps the guest's details, and can you contact those guests yourself? Can you take a card or a deposit, which OpenTable's own figures link to fewer no-shows? And what happens to your website if you ever change platform? Pricing varies by plan, so take it from each platform's own page.
How does a restaurant show up on Google Maps?
A restaurant shows up on Google Maps through its Google Business Profile, and Google says three things decide where it appears: relevance, meaning how well the profile matches what someone searched for; distance, meaning how far the restaurant is from the person searching; and prominence, meaning how well known it is, based on things like how many websites link to it and how many reviews it has. So the work is making the profile complete and accurate. Claim it in your own name, choose the category that matches how people search for you, keep the hours right, point the Menu and Reserve buttons at pages that work, and ask for reviews and reply to them. In our check of 120 Maps listings across six Irish towns in September 2026, every one of the top three in each town had a claimed profile, and all but one linked a website.
Do restaurants have to show allergens on their website?
Not as such, but the rule reaches further online than many owners expect. The Food Safety Authority of Ireland says food businesses must give allergen information in writing for non-prepacked food at the point of presentation, sale or supply, covering fourteen allergens, under S.I. No. 489 of 2014 as updated by S.I. No. 656 of 2024. For a dine-in restaurant, that point is the restaurant itself, so the website menu is not the legal requirement. It changes if you take orders online or by phone for delivery or collection. For that distance selling, the FSAI says the allergen information must be available before the purchase is concluded and again at delivery, so an ordering page has to carry it. Six of the eighteen Irish sites in our review mark allergens against each dish online, which also answers the question before the diner has to ask. This is what the FSAI's pages say, not legal advice.
