Author: Brendan Abercrombie

For Review number 4 I chose to do P.F. Chang’s as a possible competitor website for our fusion restaurant. They are considered an Asian/Chinese fusion restaurant that has been popular for a while now.  P.F. Chang’s website is actually pretty similar to the way that we are making our website as far as the layout and overall style of the site goes.  They have a main navigation bar with menus, reservations, rewards, etc. Then they feature almost a “block” style design where there are different tiles with information on them. The overall look and feel of the website is very simple, clean, and to the point which in my opinion is very important for a restaurant website as people are basically going to be doing two things- ordering or looking at the menu and that should be as simple as possible. The home page itself is built small so that there is not a lot of scrolling involved. Instead you are clicking on links to travel to the other pages. The navigation is simple and very easy to do with everything being in one central location. In my opinion the website could use a bit more, whether it was some added color or maybe something that makes the sight feel more interactive. It does its job for what it is needed for but I feel as if something more could be added to it just to make the experience of the website a little more interesting to browse.

As for comparing our website project to P.F. Chang’s I think we are going for a very similar general look and navigation style but I feel as if we are adding a bit more interactivity to our website. Its not just going to be plain with pictures of our food and simple things. We are featuring a convenient online ordering system right on our home page so that customers don’t need to search for anything and can just quickly order from our website and head out to pick up their food. I think this is a strong idea because it is straight to the point for the customer and also includes a bit more interactivity and ease for the customer when navigating our website. We certainly do not want to overdue it so that there is just a bunch of junk that is thrown all over our website but something that makes sense and works well for our customers.

 

For my two sites to compare I chose Burgatory and Smokey Bones, both of which are restaurants in the Pittsburgh area. Surprisingly enough to me, these two sites are very different from each other in the way that they are setup. Both of them have rotating images as soon as you get to the page but after that the Burgatory site is much different from Smokey Bones. Burgatory has a top, centered navigation bar at the top then as you scroll more information appears. Where as Smokey Bones site is just that initial page with rotating images and the navigation bar is on the left side going down. Both of these sites are strong in the sense of Unity in the fact that you take in the website as a whole at first then you start to take in the minor details of the website. In my opinion both of these sites also have a strong use of Emphasis. Both have a large gallery with rotating images as soon as you get to the site, this emphasizes the fact that you are on a restaurant website and what you are looking at is food. As far as Balance goes I think Burgatory’s site is done a little bit better just because of the fact that there is more information after the images at the top, the website is not just taken over with images like the Smokey Bones website is. Then looking at Layout, I also feel like Burgatory does a better job of executing its website. Everything just seems to flow a little bit better and the site just feels like it does when you are in the restaurant itself which is an interesting thing. The overall setup with the gallery at the top and the rest of the information once you scroll makes it not so overwhelming when you are trying to navigate the site. All in all; looking at both sites; I would give the win to Burgatory for a better overall site.

Websites:

http://www.burgatorybar.com/     http://smokeybones.com/

For my second website review we had to chose a one page site so I chose the portfolio website of Visual and Web Designer; Federico Guzzardi (http://www.federicoguzzardi.com/). I am a very big fan of the way that this site looks especially because of how minimalistic yet modern the site is. The main colors that he uses for his website are white and a darker greenish/blue for the color correction that he has applied to the images on his site. I am a fan of this because it keeps it simple and clean and doesn’t cause your eyes to go absolutely crazy when you are looking at this website. The navigation for this site is just a simple parallax scrolling site but the transition from one section to the other is very clean and nice looking in my opinion. Each header for each section sort of appears with an animation as you scroll which makes the experience a lot more interesting and entertaining rather than all of the information just being there.

Another thing that I really like about the site is the fact that once you get to his work it is all very clean and organized. Everything is spaced nicely and if you hover over the project you get a title and description of the type of project which I think is nice. It allows you to get an idea of what the project is but if you want to see more you have to click on the project to see the full thing. Overall I think the design of Federico’s site is done very well and is presented in a way that is minimalistic and organized and is very easy on the eye and allows you to really enjoy not only his work but also the site itself which is really nice.

The website that I chose for my website review is Nike.com. Nike has always been a very popular brand and over the years have updated their website many times to keep up with standards and continue to be creative. If you are looking for a specific product it is relatively easy to find. You can first use the search bar which is easily visible in the top right hand corner of Nike’s website. If you know the exact name of the product it will take you right to what you are looking for which is awesome for quick shopping. However if you only know some of the products name or the kind of product it will give you the most logical choices from their website. As far as the actual layout of the website it is very clean and simple which makes it easy for shopping and it does not feel crowded and makes there be less thinking involved while buying. You get to focus on the product you are looking for or find something cool if you are just browsing. They have a nice and simple task bar at the top for quick navigating and then a little further down they have some of their featured products in large tiles with a detailed picture of the product to show what it looks like for the customer. Overall Nike has a very nice, clean, and simple website that allows shopping to be easy and fun for customers.