Category: Uncategorized

A review on http://sixpennkitchen.com/ and http://no9park.com/.

Six Penn Kitchen’s has simple yet aesthetically pleasing homepage. Sixpennkitchen.com not only offers aesthetic value with it’s simple color scheme, but also offers a user friendly navigation system due to its utilities on the top and bottom of the homepage. As far as balance goes Six Penn Kitchen’s webpages each offer the same centered style, pictures, and easy to read fonts that also makes it extremely easy to find what your looking for. The website effectively uses green text to emphasize and successfully direct the users eyes to important information. Also when using the navigation system the users place is held with a “You Are Here” indicator, which helps the user not get lost while searching through Six Penn Kitchen’s website.

No. 9 Park’s website offers an elegant design with its information laid out in the center of it’s pages creating a nice balance between the right and left margins. Navigating no9park.com is made simple with it’s local navigation and utilities on the left side, which also remains stagnant while exploring the various pages. Another pleasing aspect on No. 9 Parks website is that each page has a page name as well as a “you are here” indicator making it easy to navigate while maintaining its fancy design.

Both Six Penn Kitchen’s and No.9  Park’s website offer similar color schemes with the same centered layout. Although No.9 Park’s pictures help give the website a more elegant feel, Six Penn Kitchen’s website is more visually pleasing and does a better job of directing the users eye to important information. However both websites are easy to navigate due to there navigation bars and “you are here” indicators, but No.9 Park’s website does a poor job of emphasizing important information. Both websites use the same color scheme and for the most part the same layout unifying their webpages. Overall Six Penn Kitchen and No.9 Park are extremely identical with a few differences in layout, but Six Penn Kitchen’s website offers easier to navigate pages and colors that draw the eye to important information better.

Newegg is an online computer and electronics retailer. The home page opens with marquee showcasing sales and little reminders of why you might need to buy from them. Below it there are daily sales, and below that rave review of the website itself. This is an interesting design choice, as it lets the customer first get drawn in with the products before actively selling itself, i.e. “you need this, and here’s why you should buy from us”. At the top of the page are three drop down menus leading to various parts of the site. The first breaks the items available into categories for easy navigation. The second showcases more deals, and the third is a list of hyperlinks to their various sellers.

The “all products” tab is where I first began looking for a product. As Newegg is a computer-centric website, computing parts is at the top of the list with alternatives listed in descending order of relevance. I went to a tab labeled “electronics”, and a tab opened to the side, further breaking down down the category. I wasn’t going in with any particular plan, so I instead just clicked on the electronics tab to be brought to a page version of the break down tab.

The use of the breakdown tab is a great piece of web design, as it not only offers a quick way to see if a hyperlink will be useful before clicking over, but also serving to de-clutter navigation. It’s a simple, but effective tool to help keep consumers oriented.

The electronics page was a blown up version of the tab. With a specific goal in mind navigating would be easy. Just scrolling down the website felt packed, but not necessarily crowded. Almost every inch of screen real estate is used, with just enough buffer room between sections to keep it from being overwhelming.

Clicking on a product generalization, in my case HDMI cables, the following screen is a lot cleaner. It’s less pushing options and more just presenting products. Below each products if the price, and in a neat twist, the shipping as well. If there’s anything that makes this website stand out, it’s just that cool little feature. The design itself is comparable to Amazon, but how cleanly the shipping is presented is a massive, massive thumbs up in my book.

I selected my HDMI to HDMI mini cable and added it to my cart. On one side of the page there were suggestions for other, similar products, while on the other a picture of my cable and an option to finish the sale or continue shopping. I chose to continue shopping, which led me back to the page I selected a cable from. That little detail is also noteworthy, as if it just went back to the home screen navigating back could be a pain, but getting back to the home screen from there is a simple click away.

Overall, Newegg is not a particularly spectacular website, with its design being comparable to Amazon or similar retailers, but it has a couple of neat tricks to keep things decluttered and make navigation easy. It’s clear and concise, especially if you’ve grown up using similar websites.

http://www.newegg.com/

After reading through the book and coming across Krug’s five important things, I was able to then compare two restaurant sites, www.peterallens.com and www.no9park.com, and take note of the balance, emphasis, unity, and layout.  Krug emphasizes the importance of creating clear visual hierarchies on every page, taking advantage of conventions, breaking pages into clearly defined areas, making clickable links obvious, and minimizing noise and distractions.  When visiting www.peterallens.com it was easy to see that this site had structure and organization.  Peterallen’s website displayed a strong emphasis on every page including a video featuring a food or drink item to catch your attention.  Every page had just enough information and no distractions or useless details.  The menu bar used underlines that would appear when you hover your mouse over a word, as well as highlighting the word in red making it easy to find my options and know when I was able to click it or not.  Having clean and crisp images with minimal text gives the site a nice balance as well as the color scheme throughout the entire site.  Not only is the layout clean, but it is easy to navigate, using only the necessary amount of buttons to make your way through their website without any trouble and a minimal amount of back and forth clicking.  Within every menu whether it be the drinks, dinners, or desserts, the page is clearly defined into different sections to make it easy for the viewer to narrow their search and save time.  Compared to Peterallen’s No.9 Park has a bit of a different layout but has some of the same balance and emphasis qualities.  Along the left side is a menu bar of clickable links that would navigate you to pages such as reservations, gift certificates, and private dining.  Like www.peterallens.com, No.9 Park uses Krug’s five important things to model their site, promoting their food selections through photographs that grab your attention at the top of the page.  Although the layout of the site seems clean with minimal noise, I found this site more difficult to navigate.  It was difficult to define different sections and areas as well as the text not being centered within the box.  The color scheme of this site was not as pleasing or attention grabbing as Peterallen’s.  However, the menus on this site, like the other, had little to no distraction and got right to the point.  The food item itself was listed on the page with a brief description to give the viewers a little more insight as to what the plate had to offer.  Overall I think Peterallen’s website is better in comparison to No.9 Park.  This site followed Krug’s five important things as well as having a stronger layout and better emphasis with the videos of every food and drink category.  This website caught my attention and was easy for me to navigate the entire way through.

Today I will be reviewing two websites, both are for restaurants with locations in the Pittsburgh area. The first of which is Six Penn Kitchen, described on their website as a casual yet elegant american bistro located in the heart of the cultural district of Pittsburgh. The other being Center Ave. Slice, as local as you can get this pizza place is located down the street from my house and has been there for years. My selection of websites to review today comes from a want to distinguish between a local restaurant run by a larger conglomerate, and a family owned local restaurant. The two websites are extremely different from the home page on, I will discuss each restaurant as it compares to the other and how it stands up on it’s own.

Let’s begin with Six Penn Kitchen. I enter the website and see a banner with links to sections of the sit at the top of the page. This is reasonable as Steve Krug mentions in his text, Don’t Make Me Think, we tend to look for certain things in certain places, one of which is a menu towards the top of the page. This menu banner has the following links; menus, about us, private events, news & events, gallery, location. Along with these links is the logo of the site in the top left hand corner and the name of the restaurant in the center of the banner. As far as is mentioned in the text, having the name of the restaurant, or cite ID, at the center isn’t totally on course with normal reasoning which says it should be in the top left corner. The logo though is in that location and it doesn’t seem to hurt the overall design of the site. Above the banner is links to the top right that allow for joining an email club, following on Facebook, and reserving a table, with the latter in bright orange font. On the page there is images of the front of the building, food, and a mention of free WiFi. Finally a footer with an address and legal info. Clicking the menu link a new page opens with the same banner at the top but now with a sub header menu with specific dining times, brunch, lunch, dinner, ect. clicking each of these results in another page transfer and a simple list divided into categories with items descriptions and prices. The other primary navigation links offer there own purpose, all done with unified design, and a fairly elegant as their description promises.

Now to Center Ave. Slice. The websites home page is simple, a large red header box takes up about a fourth of the screen, “Center Avenue Slice” is in a bold sans serif centered above a menu of links; Home, Specials, Menu, Contact. These are easily visible but don’t seem to be in the correct order, the most important item, “menu” is third in with “home” being the first. The homepage is really an about page, because it features an embedded commercial, images of the food, a map, and a short biographical paragraph. The other menu links each take you to a page that serves it’s purpose, although the specials page features a lot of coupons marked expired and only one that is usable at the very bottom of the page. The Menu is simply two high resolution images of the print copy of the menu. This seems to work because you really get all the information you need to order including hours, address and phone number from this single page. The contact link allows you to see an embedded google map of the location as well as the ability to send a message to the company including your name email and phone number along with your message. The overall look of the site is minimalistic in the accidental kind of way but really lacks the polish that it could have.

After looking into both sites i’m going to compare the two using Krug’s important “things” for users to understand a site. Site ID is the name of the company whose site you’re using, and usually includes a tagline as to what they do. On both sites we see the Site ID centered on the page, a strange choice as it is usually found on the top left of the page, but in any case on both sites you can clearly see it and know where you are on the internet. Page name is the name that appears in the head of html code and in the tab of your internet browser. Once again both pages use these tools to help the user, but in the case of Six Penn the page name also includes the site ID. As an example the location page of each site is named as follows, “Location|Six Penn” and “Location” the latter being that of Center Ave. Slices site. The addition of the site ID helps the user who has multiple restaurant websites up at once, which occurs often when deciding between two or more places to eat. Primary navigation is the main menu so to speak, the most important links on the page. They run along the header in both sites but as mentioned before the order of Six Penn’s links makes more sense than that of Center Ave. Slice’s. The local navigation is the second level of menus, in this case only Six Penn has a second level of navigation, with Center Ave. Slice having one page per main link. Location indicators are simply ways that the user can tell where they are in the site. In the case of both restaurants they use slight changes in the primary links to show which of them you are currently viewing. Six Penn’s change to green when on their pages, and Center Ave. Slice’s are surrounded by a lighter box when selected. Finally a search bar, which is a way of finding pages on a site using inputted text. Neither site has a search bar, this is something that could help the type of person who has no time or care to look through a whole site for information. Having most of the important things helps both sites to be adequate for what is needed of it, with most of the differences being in time and polish put into the design of the site.

Amazon is a website that many are familiar with. It is a website that not only looks good visually, but is also extremely functional and easy to use. When on Amazon I searched for new wheels for my car (I am in need of summer wheels so I no longer have to pay the fee to have my tires switched twice a year). The search bar was simple to find. At the top of the page there is an add for Amazon itself and underneath is a blue section with deals and the option to set up an account. In the upper left hand side of the bar there is a white search bar with different category options. The way the webpage is set up your eye is instantly drawn to the search bar. This is helpful for those who are in a hurry and want to find what they are looking for quickly.

Whenever I searched for my wheels at first I did not chose a department in which to search, and obviously I did not find what I was looking for. On the left hand side I was given the option to narrow down my search. Using this function I was able to narrow down the search field. In the automotive section I was able to put in which car I have and narrow it down to what would fit. This whole process took less than 10 minutes and I was able to find the wheels that I wanted.

Not once during this experience did I feel confused or frustrated. I did an experiment in which I had my five year old cousin search for a tablet and he was able to find what I told him to with little to no guidance. All in all Amazon is a very viewer friendly website that is simple to use and very well made.

So the two sites that I took upon to visit were Bravo Franco Ristorante and Six Penn Kitchen. For starters both sites are in balance with their image placement and alignment of the navigation menus. One thing taken from Six Penn Kitchen that I noticed was very similar to Bravo Franco Ristorante is the layout of the front page. They are keen on showcasing their dishes, preferably the most favorite by chef or consumer, and they both have similar styles of dining fashion placed from the imagery. Krug states in “Don’t Make Me Think” that putting more into the page to make a page shorter helps with people being able to see all the content without having to scroll anywhere.

The nature of Six Penn Kitchen is more simplistic, with very little text placed on the front page, making the consumers seek for more if they are interested in trying out the restaurant. It seems that this is a tactic placed more on Six Penn Kitchen’s page than it would be on Bravo Franco Ristorante’s page. Bravo Franco’s is more inclined to place text about the hours they are open, what they are all about with the food, and their events all at the bottom in a short paragraph throughout page switches. What Bravo Franco Ristorante’s page and Six Penn Kitchen’s page does is also stated in Krug’s five things about helping the user with using the interface with less noise level. Both seem to accomplish that aspect of being able to read and use the navigation controls, text, etc. all in the first page. Six Penn Kitchen’s page is with little to no text so you are basically using the navigation bar up top to scrounge through the info on their tabs placed at the top pages. Bravo’s is identical in the same style where using the nav. bars and tabs up top will help with showcasing their information about the place.

Something about Six Penn Kitchen’s page caught my attention based on their usage of less info, but more stylized image placement on the page. Their layout seems to grasp at placing their great food, what they have accomplished, and what they feature their in one simple task from placing them in a contained layout format. They’ve basically unified the home page as a simplistic one phrase way of describing their restaurant, because they feel less is more helps with bringing in new costumers.