Thesoupkitchen.com is a website for a small franchise of restaurants in Tennessee who seek to break away from the typical fast food market by focusing their menu on Soup, Salad, and Sandwiches (but mostly soup). Their website is simple and straightforward: A grey textured background resembling stone borders a white rectangle where the menu and the information for one of the few pages sit, giving it a hearty and homemade feel. Fixed above, and right aligned with the box sits several links to several of their locations, which when hovered over changes text color from white to red and creates a drop down menu where one can find out pretty much anything they’d wish to know, such as what’s on the menu, directions, job applications, contact, and more. If you click direction on the city it underlines the text, which is the only really indication of where you are at in the site asides from the headers, and takes you to a summarized version of each section, along with some pop-up links to social media links where you can read tweets, like on Facebook, and see pictures of their locations on Flickr. While a majority of the text changes with each page, a search bar and list of soups always remains underneath a changing picture of a soup of some sorts. Though a little inconvenient and a little confusing (for such a small and focused site what would someone need to search for?) whenever used it brings up pretty much the same list of information as above, just in a vertical format.
While The Soup Kitchen may have an impressive menu of soups that show a lot of diversity, and a simple interface, the site for Soups of the Seven Seas is more fun and interesting to use. The main page features a table spread much like what you’ll find at our location: A big bowl of soup with floating noodles that take you to the menu page, a cell phone which vibrates when you hover over it to let you know how to get in touch with us, a loose polaroid picture to take you to the gallery (because who doesn’t enjoy staring at a nice hot bowl of soup), and much more to discover. When you venture to another page a row of bowls with the name of each page it directs to (and a little blow of steam coming from the one you’re currently on) sits above a white box which holds the information for the page, surrounded by an orange back ground which gives off a warm and appetizing appeal. Though after the main page soupsofthesevenseas.com gains a more simplistic appeal, it navigates efficiently making it easy to get around so anyone can find out whatever they need to know in just a few clicks!