Ames' syllabi

For this specific review, I chose to look at the Puma website when buying shoes for running. I chose a pair at random and selected to add them to the cart. Being someone who has a slight history of work with web design and the amount of different things it takes to create a website feature like this, it really is wild for me personally to think about this. The first thing that happened when I added the item to the cart was a new window opening, prompting me to sign up for the Puma website and subscribe to their newsletter. Although to some this may be annoying, in the long run it can be a very smart tactic, considering there’s probably a lot of people who follow through with the instructions rather than skipping the process. That pop-up in itself probably takes a great deal of coding to be able to perfect. The next window showed my cart, which is something that really made me think. This website along with most websites have the feature of a virtual cart, which carries specifically chosen items from page to page, keeping them in line and ultimately allowing you to eventually check out. It begins to give me a bit of a headache when I think about all that goes into this.

The cart feature definitely makes it easier for people to find and buy things they’re interested in, and probably prompts users to be able to buy more items easier and faster. I felt as though the site could be navigated rather smoothly, and was also very pleasing in it’s look and layout.

Ulta has a visually pleasing website at first glance. The colors work well and tie in to the brand as a whole, coming from an Advertising point of view. The search bar is front and center with an easy-to-decipher navigation bar on the lefthand side. The categories make it easy to break down what you’re looking for into smaller subsections. Also, when looking at the homepage it has the sales pictured in a slideshow type of way in the very center of the page. There is a popup at the bottom of the homepage (it follows and stays at the bottom even when you scroll down the page) that gives you the option to sign up for emails and future sales. The homepage is very scannable.

I used the search bar to look for the Tarte Shape Tape Concealer and placed it in my cart. The process was easy and thoughtless. The links were made obvious and once I added the item to the cart there was an option to go to checkout or to continue shopping and this was made clear with the buttons shown on the screen. There were suggested  products based on my purchase interest that made it easy to browse similar products.

Going back to the homepage, if I didn’t use the search bar it would take a few extra clicks to find the exact product that I was looking for. However, I would still successfully make it there in a fairly short amount of time with minimal thinking and question. If I was searching for concealer in general, it would be easy to find all products that fall under that category and then compare all products to find the best match for me. If I wanted to shop for products in term of brand, that would be just as easy with the “Shop by Brand” link at the top of the navigation bar on the lefthand side.

There was not a moment that I questioned where I should click or what to search for or which link would be the most efficient one to click to take me where I wanted to go. Navigation through this website seemed natural and “thoughtless”. Users with little online experience would be able to successfully navigate their way around the site to find the products they’re looking for and checkout with little to no frustration. According to Steve Krug in his book, Don’t Make Me Think, it is important for users to not question where they need to go within a site; everything should be easy and scannable. When scanning Ulta’s website, I can easily find my desired destination thanks to their good use of layout and links.

The website I chose to review is Musician’s friend. The first element I saw when I opened the homepage was everything was an organized in a fashion that is accessible t0 everyone. I then used the search bar to look up a guitar, when I found the guitar I wanted, I then advanced to the page for that guitar and added it to my cart. When I clicked to add to cart, a pop up of a warranty option came up and it gave you four options to choose from and then you proceeded to your cart. I like that you are given the option to see what the warranty would cost. If you are pricing out your product and want to see what options you can add so that you see how much money it would cost you in the end. When you are finally in your cart you get a couple more options, you can either review your order and warranty or proceed to checkout. Another thing that is on the page is the option to add things to your order that are related to your item. If you choose the option of adding another item you will restart the process from the point of where you added the guitar to your cart. I find it is very easy to navigate through the site. I believe that from the beginning of the process through the check out does not make you think. It is easy to use the search bar and the pull door category to find any type of product that you are looking for even if you are not a musician. This process made me relieve that some sites are a lot harder to use now that I’ve come to realize how easy this website was to use.

I will never forget the first time I shopped online, I thought “Wow, this great, simple way to feed the shopping addiction I have.” Initially, I hesitated jumping on the online shopping bandwagon, thinking the process would easily frustrate me. I worried about misleading products and having to deal with various return policies. However, I was wrong; online shopping has made shopping so much easier at the click of a button. However, I was let down recently when I went to make a purchase at Fabletics.com.

Fabletics.com features an athletic apparel line for women created by Kate Hudson and JustFab Inc. I thought “Look at Kate Hudson, she’s fabulous. I want to be fabulous.” This is when I decided to venture to the website. My first impression of the site was that it was fairly easy to navigate, with simple fonts and a nice little drop down arrow where it says “shop”. The site makes it obvious where to click on things, the prices stand out, and the merchandise is presented well. I had the perfect outfit selected and was eager to checkout. As I went to purchase I noticed it did not take me to my shopping cart, and a quiz popped up. The first wave of frustration came over me as I discovered I had to complete the quiz to purchase. The quiz is made to customize your shopping experience. I thought this was a nice feature and would make my shopping experience more efficient in the future.

What I did not realize is that to shop on Fabletics.com you must sign up to be billed every month for merchandise, and must skip each month by a certain date if you do not wish to purchase that month.  I found it irritating that I would have to go through the lengthy process of a quiz and remember to cancel subscriptions to make a single purchase. This I did not like; I feel that this complicated the entire checkout. When reading Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug something emphasized throughout the first couple of chapters is that the website user is always in a hurry. This is a very true fact, and imagine trying to explain how this site works to your grandma, I doubt she would remember to cancel that subscription or take the time to take a quiz every time she shops. I won’t be expecting any gifts from Fabletics.com from grandma any time soon, because the site complicates one-time purchases.

A sad ending to the story, as much as I loved the athletic wear on Fabletics.com I never purchased anything, because I find the checkout process to be a headache. It would be wise for Fabletics.com to allow guest checkouts that do not require any kind of subscription or extra steps to checkout. I would purchase merchandise from them frequently if they simplified the checkout process.

Taco Bell VS. Taco ‘bout Sushi:

Taco Bell, a somewhat well known and arguably acclaimed chain of restaurants, is likely the biggest competition an up and coming Taco Sushi/Sushi Taco shop can face. While “Taco ‘bout Sushi” has a clear advantage of offering two delicious types of food in one easy to acquire package, “Taco Bell” has the advantage of being a multi-million chain restaurant with decades of experience and customer loyalty under their belt offering products at a third the of our prices. Needless to say, as the future go to Taco place, Taco Bell is our greatest adversary.

Examining their website is an adventure into bright colors and pictures of food. While one might associate mexican food with more earthy tones and dark greens, Taco bell makes the interesting choice going with a palette of rich purple and dark blacks. This is an odd choice, purple isn’t a color associated with fast food or mexican, nor have the advantage the color red has of stimulating hunger. While not exactly intuitive for a mexican restaurant it would stick out like a sore thumb when compared to the humble “Taco ‘bout Sushi” website. We go with a more traditional color scheme, featuring shades of brown and off whites, combining taco shell orange with salmon-ish pink. It’s not over stimulating and while has a more varied palette feels more welcoming. Taco Bell’s purple feels empowered, bold,  and loud. This feels extreme for a mexican restaurant, or in our case, the humble sushi taco. Perhaps the in-your-face feeling is appealing to some, but doesn’t feel suited for the style of restaurant.

Taco Bell made an interesting decision when building the layout of the site. While many similar websites, including “Taco ‘bout Sushi”, choose to place a navigation bar at the top of the page, roughly eye level for any visitors, Taco Bell instead places their navigation bar on the left hand side. This features a few options, including Food, an online menu/opportunity to order food; Locations, a simple search for taco bells in your area; The Feed, a Taco Bell News page; Live Mas; a page about Taco Bell’s charitable actions; and a “More” tab.  Opening “More” pulls out a tab from the side. The tab includes links to a news page, carreer opportunities, Nutrition facts, an online apparel store, a contact page, and their “About” page for the company. Despite being organized, it’s more cluttered. It feels like there’s always more to see, which while is good incentive for a customer to search the entire site is also nigh overwhelming. The color scheme is fitting for the design, to say the least. There is navigation bar at the top of the screen, but given how small the text is and the options available it’s clear the side bar is the main attraction. It allows a search of the menu, a “log in” option, and an easy search for a restaurant near you. “Taco ‘bout Sushi” is a simpler, humbler layout. A logo in one corner and basic location information in the other, all other aspects of the site can be navigated to via our navigation bar at the top of the page. It’s a constant part of the page, making it easy to get anywhere from anywhere on the site. It’s simple and clean, thoroughly intuitive, and most of all all about putting the customer first.

At first glance navigating the Taco Bell website seems fairly intuitive. Everything is correctly labeled, but the labels aren’t quite obvious, in particular “The Feed” and “Live Mas”. The feed, while revealed to be a pun if explored, could be any number of things for a mexican restaurant. It makes sense, but most hungry customers won’t care enough to check. Live Mas, the latest taco bell slogan, means “live more”. While it’s debatable if you’re truly living without sushi in your tacos, the problem lies more in the use of spanish. Mas, a simple word, still isn’t part of the American vocalbularly. It, like the rest of the website, is more about encouraging further exploration of the site rather than the simple “A to B” route that would best serve the customer. That being said, it at least succeeds at its purpose. The true confusion comes, however, with clicking the “food” tab. It presents large pictures of food, with the interesting design choice of scrolling down unveiling a new layer/section of the menu. It’s a very intriguing “animation”, but seems unnecessarily complicated and serves little more than to throw the visitor off.

On paper Taco Bell’s website clearly trumps the “Taco ‘bout sushi”. It’s bold, makes creative design choices, and has obvious brand recognition on its side. Where our website really shines though is the idea of “deafening silence”. The simplicity of the design and muted colors make it more visually appealing. It’s not overbearing and is a good representation of the product sold. Our site is one that a grandma could  use with confidence. Taco Bell, while the gateway to delicious tacos, over complicates what could be a simple process.

For my website review I decided to look at the websites of two restaurants, Kiyoshi and Meat & Potatoes. My group is actually using Meat & Potatoes as a guideline for our own website endeavors, but that’s not to say that Kiyoshi’s website is lacking in anyway, but it is a bit. Both websites are simple in their own way, but each is able to deliver their information in a clean and fluid motion thanks to their layout, color, texture and navigation.

Let’s take a look at Meat & Potatoes first. When you first go to the website you are sent to a home screen with a black background with the faintest hint of design in the middle of the page with a butcher’s diagram of a steer. However instead of the diagram dividing the steer into its parts of meat they decided to label it with the navigation bar options. Each is clickable and directs you to the appropriate page. Much like the home page each page of their website has a black background with the faint hint of a design and they place the information within customized elegant brackets. In short Meat & Potatoes website is plain, basic, but elegant and informative.

Then there is Kiyoshi, Like I said before their website is in no way inferior to Meat & Potatoes in terms of information distribution, but what they lack is creativity and use of their page layout. When you first open Kiyoshi’s website you are exposed to a very plain and utilitarian navigation bar in the top corner with the graphic design of their name below and on the left. Below that there is a scrolling of 5 images in a box. All over the home page there is pictures of food but when you get to the actual menu there isn’t a single picture and the pictures of the menu are out of focus and slightly blurry. This caused my eyes to hurt a bit while looking at the screen.

Like I said multiple times now, Kiyoshi is not a bad site, if you like a utilitarian website that get’s you were you want to go. However, as I am a TV & Video Production major, hoping to entertain people with whatever I create, I believe that no matter what you make it should be visually and audibly appealing to your audience and if you happen to not have one of them then the other should compensate for the lack of the other. So when it comes down to the two Meat & Potatoes is the better website in my book for its simple yet elegant design, and is why my group and I look to it for inspiration for our own website.

The website that would be considered competition to our website would be Meat and Potatoes. The layout of our website has a very similar structure to it with the center of the website having the initial navigation bar. The logo will also share a similarity with the positioning being relatively close to the same spot. When it comes to the navigation, the way that both our website and the one for Meat and Potatoes has the animal combined with the navigating. Both of the websites have a separate bar of navigation that the viewer can click on once they click on a page. It shows up on the top of the website that lets you choose The other pages to go to. The difference is that our website contains different options for the navigation. Our website  does not have pages that would take you to a gallery, or events. When it comes to the way that the two websites used a color scheme, they are not even close to the same. The Meat and Potatoes website uses black as a main color for the background, and has white around the Cow, with a little yellow around the sides. Our website contains more lively colors suck as greens, blues, whites, and other colors that make the viewers eyes pop. the animal on our website, the “Kraken” is a completely different color than the rest of our website. the two websites do have many similarities, such as the layout of the search bar and the way that they both follow the rule of having a navigation bar on different pages. However, the websites have different color and textures. their website has a very metallic, and hard but smooth texture, where as ours has a cartoony, and under water feel and texture.

I chose Patron’s Mexican Grill’s website http://www.patronmexicangrills.com to compare with our final restaurant design. I specifically chose Patron’s because we are trying to give our site a more Mexican cultural feel while trying to keep it clean and simple. Patron’s use of color and texture really tie in the over all feel that we are looking for. The green, orange and yellow are similar to our color scheme. However I think the incorporation of magenta as the footer of the site and navy blue in the logo do not work well with the overall theme. While the colors follow the typical theme of a Mexican restaurant I think they should’ve stuck to a solid 3 or 4 colors to tie the whole site together. Instead they used a total of 11 colors that make the color scheme seem ill thought out and almost collaged.

As far as the layout goes, there are side bars that are texturized which overall helps add a sense of legitimacy. This texture works well in the overall sense, however I do not think a texture of a similar sort would work well on my final restaurant site. The center column which holds all the information works well and makes navigation a little easier as your eye isn’t distracted over the whole page. The only aspect that doesn’t work that well was one particular bar used to divide sections which extends past the center banner. Given that no other of the dividers do this, it looks out of place.

The overall navigation on the page works well. Everything flows seamlessly. The navigation bar and the buttons are easy enough to locate since they are at the top of the page with easy transition between each different button. Because it is a restaurant site, it lacks some of the normal elements most websites hold including a tag line and welcome blurb. This being because all that information is included within the logo.

While Patron’s website is still navigable and easy to read, it lacks an overall brand. With our final restaurant page we are doing our best to make sure the site works well as a whole, through our color scheme, graphics, and type. We stuck to a color scheme of 3 colors and chose a more simplistic approach to make sure it looks clean. We want the overall appearance to give off the image of our restaurant as being clean, organized, and accessible.

cafedesamispa.com

I chose Cafe Des Amis to be the competition for the final project. The site overall is not a strong presentation. The layout of the site is just a white box centered and a red background. The hierarchy of site is not very consistent. The logo is the largest item, but then the second biggest thing is the hours and address before the menu and the other items. The alignment and sizes are completely random and not organized. The social media buttons are not even on the main strip and are off onto the red bar. They are large and distracting. There is a use of texture in the header, but it really doesn’t work with the color scheme or seem to serve a purpose. It has a cloth look to it. The navigation is a standard menu bar with sections, but the site doesn’t give any breadcrumbs to where you are at currently. Nothing is highlighted and there isn’t a trail. The only thing that tells you is if it the specific page has a page id. There aren’t any “you are here” indicators as mentioned in the book. The site doesn’t pass the trunk test. A good thing is that the layout does stay consistent throughout the site. It doesn’t really guide you, it’s more of a see what you can click and hope for the best. It uses a matrix architecture. In the end, the website could use a lot of work on the technical and design aspect.

Our website has some similarities, but differ in polish. We have a set header and footer that stay consistent, but things are aligned and the hierarchy is consistent. The logo and site id are largest, then the navigation bar and the images inside the page. The actual content of each page changes and isn’t just a white block. We have graphics that are animated and jquery. Our site includes indicators to where you are on the site having page names and the sections highlighted to where you are located. Our color scheme includes reds and yellows, which are commonly used in the food industry because it increases the metabolism and can make you hungrier as stated in the color article. We used many different shapes and graphics to make the layout dynmaic and interesting while still being easily navigated. Objects and images are being rotated and changed for each page. We use a use of shadow to add depth to our skewers. Overall, our website stands out significantly to cafedesamispa.com.

Tristan Coyle.

For the final review, I compared my fusion restaurant, Taco ‘Bout It, with TakoSushi.com. I will say that I am very impressed with Tako Sushi. Their home page is very intriguing. The color scheme is red with grey and yellow accents. It has a very vintage feel to it. Their navigation bar is located across the top. The give the options of “Our Story”, “Menu”, “Locations”, “News”, “Products”, “Contact”. These six options are separated by their logo, which also acts as the button to their home page.  Their navigation is very easy and is suitable for any person.

I also like that Tako Sushi has a “Products” option where they sell t-shirts, tumblers, art, and their sauces. Having company products with easy help attract customers. T-shirts, especially, will attract a lot of people, especially since they are only $5 on Tuesdays.

The only flaw I have with TakoSushi.com is that it is not very consistent. Some pages are aligned left, while other pages are aligned center. Also, some pages are very heavy on the yellow accents, some only have a few yellow accents, and some do not have any at all. Going page to page, it is not appealing to see yellow, and then no yellow because I feel like the yellow gives off a happy vibe, and then changing to a dull grey changes that vibe. In comparison to my site, I think my site has an advantage because it is consistent. Each page is aligned the same. Having everything the same makes it easier on the eye to go page to page. Also, the color scheme is the same throughout. There is not one page heavier on the accent colors than the others, they are all even. TakoSushi.com has its flaws, but it also gave me some inspiration.

For Review 3, I reviewed No. 9 and Six Penn Kitchen. These websites were fairly similar in their set up. Each are placed upon a black background with the main information in the center. No. 9 had some added emphasis to their site by creating a color contrast around their text.

Six Penn Kitchen is very consistent. They have all of their options across the top, and whenever you click on “Menu”, for example, the other options are still visible and available for navigation. No matter what page you go to, the layout and color scheme is the exact same. No. 9 has their options along the left hand side, and as the options stay consistent, the format of the pages do not stay consistent with every single page. Some have just a picture, and some have a picture with a border. Other than this, the website is uniform. Each website has navigation panels that makes it easy for any reader to navigate. Six Penn has a feature that I do like more than No. 9’s website, and that is that there is a button to navigate back to the home page.

Out of the two, I must say that I like Six Penn Kitchen more. I find the color scheme and the layout extremely appealing, and very easy to view. It makes the site look very intriguing. No. 9 is a little bit too plain for me with the colors.