I chose to compare my final website Doblé Dragon with the website for the restaurant: Ellen’s Stardust which is located in New York City. I chose to compare these websites because they both are restaurants that focus on the experience of being there. Doblé Dragon is geared towards an alternative younger group of people. It has quite a dark theme and could be considered “goth” in its style. Ellen’s Stardust is a family restaurant that is popular for the performances the staff do because they are all people working while trying to find a job on Broadway.
Beginning with Ellen’s Stardust, the homepage is set up in a very simple manner, the nav bar is located on the left side of the screen and there are several photos covering the home page. The photos depict the different activities that occur at the restaurant. It is somewhat confusing because little blurbs of information pop up when the cursor moves over the image making you think it’s clickable. The nav bar is set up in an easy manner. The different links to the pages are clear leaving zero hesitation when clicking on a page. The gallery page doesn’t link to anything so I don’t know if there is something wrong with the website at the moment but that’s the only page not working. Everything else is set up in a clean manner. When moving through the pages, there is a good mixture of images and type. There isn’t a lot of type making it very easy to take in the information. Images are used a lot to help assist the reader take in information. Their use of type stays consistent throughout the website except for the menu. But every other page uses the same font and font size to differentiate between headings and blocks of information. Every page has the navigation bar on the left which contains links to all of the pages of the website while also including the logo and links to their social media pages. The website is predominately white, allowing the images to bring color to the website. This website overall is created in a clean manner that makes it very easy to use.
Comparing Doblé Dragon’s website, the homepage is also created in a very simple manner. The only items contained are the logo, hours, nav bar, and location with google maps. The nav bar is set up in three different pages with a sub navigation on the menu page. When reading the nav bar, the page titled “our people” could possibly be slightly confusing because it doesn’t have a clearly named title. The style overall is very consistent with limited images and spaced out type. We kept the information light on the website as to not overwhelm the user. When clicking the menu, there is a sub navigation menu that breaks up the menu into the different types of food or drinks. This was done to make it very easy for people to find what they are looking for. Both of these websites have very simple designs with few different pages. They both have limited text use to make it easier to read as well.
While both restaurants focus on the experience that will happen when you visit it, Doblé Dragon focuses more on the people who work at the restaurant. In addition, the Doblé Dragon website has a strong style to it that matches what the atmosphere would feel like when at the restaurant. Ellen’s Stardust says that it has a retro style within the restaurant itself but has very little to represent that in the website. I believe that is a major draw back because if the viewer isn’t captured by the appearance of the website they might not be interested enough to read about it. So not giving a feeling of your restaurant in the appearance of the website can make people click away if they feel they don’t have the time to find out if it would be a restaurant that interests them.