Site Review #3

For my third website review, I chose to compare the sites Burgatory.com and Mad Mex.com. Both sites, upon visiting the homepages, are stylized with images and graphics as well as multiple textures. Both restaurants are dedicated to a more casual dining experience and at first glance their websites show that by not being too minimalistic or use too many “fancy” fonts that some more high-end restaurants use.
Burgatory makes it clear that they are a specialized burger place by having a large hamburger graphic at the forefront of their page. Burgatory differs from MadMex a lot in their use of navigation. In Burgatory’s case, their navigation is off to the right side of the page, and contains a drop down to certain categories, contrary to MadMex’s site, where they have a traditional horizontal navigation bar near the top of the page, but do not have any drop down menus.
I feel like Burgatory also has MadMex beat in balance qualities on their site, Burgatory has information stacked almost equally on their website, while MadMex has information leveled on one side of the site more than the other. One case of this imbalance is in the navigation bar at the top of MadMex’s site, where the left side is larger font than the right side of links. While this does use a little bit of emphasis to show that those are the most useful and used links, it looks a little odd.
Burgatory shows its emphasis on certain menu items by the “slideshow” of items (separated by burgers and shakes) on it’s front page. The large text it shows on top of the floating image, the emphasis is on their product and the name of a specific product, as well as the menu which is referenced when hovering over the image in different spots.
In the case of making links on their sites easy to find, both sites do a good job. MadMex has their links highlight with an underline to indicate it can be clicked, Burgatory has their links highlight in a different color when hovered on.
Both sites has a little problem with noise. MadMex’s site has an automatic slideshow showing different promotions and events at the restaurant, as well as a weird stack of links on the front page that is not organized into the top or bottom navigation bars of the site, and is visible before the introduction of the establishment. These things take away from the experience of the website and can disrupt the process of getting the wanted information from the site. If these links were put into the categories in the navigation bar at the top of the website, I think it would make the website a little easier to go through, as well as navigate to desired pages. As for the slideshow, making it click-through instead of automatic would be a little less distracting. Burgatory’s noise issue is just in top of their homepage, where their single burger/milkshake highlight slideshow is. In this part, the slideshow is bordered by both the logo and the navigation bar on both sides of it, as well as a gift card graphic/link right below the navigation bar on the right. With the buttons to go left or right in the sideshow so close to other links, I found that sometimes when looking at a menu item in the slideshow and going to the next one, I would be at the giftcard page because I accidentally clicked it instead of the “next” arrow.
Overall, I prefer to navigate through Burgatory’s website over MadMex’s website, Burgatory offers the eye a lot in terms of their design and graphics, as well as the organization of their information, which is easy to seek out and read. MadMex for the most part is clean, but with faults in terms of their organization of text, and their odd choice of link emphasis and the displacement of links.