Author: Anthony Ritacco

For this assignment, I looked at the website for Noodlebox (http://www.noodlebox.ca/). This restaurant is looked at as competition to our website due to the Asian-styled food mixed with another element, westernization.

The website at first glance seems like a one-page website, then moves on to being a multi-page website when you click on the last two tabs. This layout is concerning and very startling when you don’t expect it. The other concerning element is the delivery menu at the top of the screen. Every time the page is changed the last thing to load is this delivery option, causing the whole screen to jerk down for a moment. This web page has some pluses when it comes to layout also. The screen’s menu scrolls with the rest of the website, following you on the way down. Picture galleries can be found on the homepage and they flow well with the rest of the page.

The whole website has a very dark black color with white text and red elements. The black makes the words pop but very difficult to read after a while. The name of the restaurant also is put over a photo and is very hard to read at first glance. If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you have to scroll all the way up in order to get back up. If someone wants to find something on this website, they most likely can.

The website is very professional and compared to ours looks like it has had a lot of time put into it over a long period of time. The amount of information put on each page is overwhelming at times. The darkness is unsettling on Noodlebox’s website and ours is more welcoming comparatively. Our website has a more uniform feel when it comes to navigation and that is what stands out amongst the two.

For this assignment, I looked at the websites for Il Pizzaiolo (http://pizzaioloprimo.com/) and Six Penn Kitchen (http://sixpennkitchen.com/news-from-the-corner.aspx). Both restaurants that were chosen are found in the city of Pittsburgh.

Six Penn Kitchen, at the time of this review, had some photos on their homepage that were aligned to the left side of the page with huge amounts of blank space to the right. The balance of the website is odd on other pages just by them all be center-aligned or left-aligned with way too much blank space. Il Pizzaiolo, however, had photos accompanying their text on almost every page.

 

As far as unity was concerned, everything seemed to belong on the website for Il Pizzaiolo. The text of the headers accompanied the paragraph text, the photos fit and weren’t awkward at all, and the color scheme just worked. The website for Six Penn Kitchen really dropped the ball on this one. The simple coding and the lack of effort left a lot to be desired when it came to unity in their department. The photos are awkwardly placed, the text is hard to read, and when the website is in its smallest/simplest form, it just doesn’t work.

 

The emphasis on most pages for Six Penn Kitchen are often lost with the giant logo in the middle of the screen. The colors of the text draw your eye, but make it hard to stay anywhere. As you navigate and scroll through the Il Pizzaiolo website, things subtly shift and change. These changes make the emphasis adapt to where you are on each page and where you should look.

 

The layout of these websites are quite similar, however, there is one major difference. Both of these websites use a top bar and use it to navigate throughout the websites. Il Pizzaiolo makes the bar scroll with you and has an additional side-scrolling bar for each element on each page. Six Penn kitchen highlights the page you are on and leaves you there, if you scroll down you have to go back to the top to use the bar again.

 

The main principles of Steve Krug’s book seem to be relevant in both, but dominant in Il Pizzaiolo.  The websites rarely make me think, but I am less satisfied with Six Penn Kitchen’s design and layout. The wording is a lot more condensed and easy to scan on Il Pizzaiolo’s website, and no matter where I go I can get back or go forward with ease. Six Penn Kitchen loses in all aspects in this fight and should consider renovation.

When I opened up One Page Love the first website that caught my eye was one named Meet The Greek. I had no clue what the website was about or why a man was just sitting on a couch in an otherwise empty room. After exploring the website for a few seconds I noticed the website was for a restaurant that could be found in Australia. My initial thought was how amazingly smooth the transition from one tab of information to the next was. Navigation was easy and the video of which showed the sitting man changed depending on what tab you were on.

 

As for color and texture, most of that was found in the video itself. The floor and the walls along with the close-ups of the man himself all brought depth to the website alongside the white panels with text. The panels come out when you navigate throughout the website and the panels are white with what seems to be an off black/brown text. All outside text is black or white and the logo is black unless there is a transition video going on, then it turns white.

 

Navigation is easy on this website. You click a tab and you are there. The only thing that I wished that they would improve upon is the menu. The menu for the website is way too long to be set up the way it is. Continuously scrolling down a menu of which doesn’t even have a scroll bar is obnoxious.
I already praised the navigation for being easy, the design for being beautiful, and the videos for being unique and easily relatable to the tab of which you are exploring. It’s easy for me to say that this website is well done and I am even envious of Australia for being able to eat there.