The restaurant Piccolo Forno would be competition for our restaurant, as it is both located in Pittsburgh and is a higher class Italian eatery. The website has a good layout to it, the images and text fit nicely on the screen, with the image sitting the full width of the screen. On the home page it has a quick snippet of background information and scrolls down through links to the menu and finally ending with their hours. The color scheme works very well for their restaurant, with a deeper red, a green, and a cream. With the Italian cuisine and the typical Italian colors it works well, they are also very clean with adds to the classier feel. The navigation for the site makes the view flow from page to page. They have a navigation bar at the top with their logo to the far left that returns you to the homepage. The menu page is laid out very nicely with even spacing and it is easy to follow. The descriptions beneath the entree name is short but gives good information. With each individual heading only containing one page it makes it easy to navigate throughout the site, without drop down menus or a stack of pages to go through to find information. Compared to this site, I would say that ours is just as easy to follow. Though our menu does have a drop down in the navigation bar for individual menus such as wines/drinks/entrees/desserts. I would say that theirs seems a little bit more colorful and bright which would help keep the viewers attention, so that is something that we can change on our site. But something that will make our site stand out is that we do have a good amount of images to go with our site, with photos of our food, drink and location that run across the top of every page.
Review 3 Jennifer Hoffman
The websites I chose were peterallen.com and Six Penn Kitchen. Starting with Peter Allen, the site was very easy to navigate and was nicely organized. In the book they talk about having broad headings that trickle down into more specific categories which is what Peter Allen does. Their headings include: Menu, Drinks, Reservations, Directions, and Contact Us. When you hover over Menu, it has a drop down that breaks the categories down into Lunch, Dinner, Dessert and Late Night. Which ever you click on takes you to that specific menu. But when looking at Six Penn Kitchen, instead of a drop down menu, when you click “Menu” it takes you to a menu where you can then narrow it down with a heading bar at the top. Both sights have great navigation located at the top of their sites, the headings are clear as to what their topic is about and when you hover over them, they make it clear what you are hovering over (changing color or underlining). They both have a place to reserve a table, with Peter Allen it is a separate tab, but with Six Penn Kitchen it is a link that sits above the navigation bar. Both sites have a nice navigation flow to them that leads you from one page to another. But looking at the bigger picture I think that Six Penn Kitchen has the better navigation because you have to click on the heading itself to find the smaller categories. I feel like that makes it easier to find things because you are already in the broad heading.
Review #1 – eCommerce
Jennifer Hoffman
http://www.modcloth.com/
The site I am reviewing is for Mod Cloth, which sells clothing, bedding, room decor and more. This site fits the “Don’t Make Me Think” criteria. The buttons that you are meant to push to navigate through the site either hightlights when the cursor is hovering over it, or is within a bound box as a button, just as the book describes. Everything is laid out very simply, with headings such as “Dresses” “Shoes” and “Home & Gifts” to name a few. When you hover over the headings you get a drop down that lays it out to more specific categories such as “Graphic Tees” “Leggings” and “Bedding”. This organization makes it very easy to browse their products and to find exactly what you are looking for.
When you find the product that you want, it is very easy to add it to your “bag”, as there is a large pink button that says “Add to Bag” and even directly takes you to the bag to view all the items that you have saved in it. To view your bag at any given time, there is a small icon shaped as a tote bag, on the top right of the screen, right next to a large button that says “Check Out”.
Over all this site is very easy to navigate and is well designed to make saving and purchasing your items fast and simple.