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.
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