Today I will be reviewing two websites, both are for restaurants with locations in the Pittsburgh area. The first of which is Six Penn Kitchen, described on their website as a casual yet elegant american bistro located in the heart of the cultural district of Pittsburgh. The other being Center Ave. Slice, as local as you can get this pizza place is located down the street from my house and has been there for years. My selection of websites to review today comes from a want to distinguish between a local restaurant run by a larger conglomerate, and a family owned local restaurant. The two websites are extremely different from the home page on, I will discuss each restaurant as it compares to the other and how it stands up on it’s own.
Let’s begin with Six Penn Kitchen. I enter the website and see a banner with links to sections of the sit at the top of the page. This is reasonable as Steve Krug mentions in his text, Don’t Make Me Think, we tend to look for certain things in certain places, one of which is a menu towards the top of the page. This menu banner has the following links; menus, about us, private events, news & events, gallery, location. Along with these links is the logo of the site in the top left hand corner and the name of the restaurant in the center of the banner. As far as is mentioned in the text, having the name of the restaurant, or cite ID, at the center isn’t totally on course with normal reasoning which says it should be in the top left corner. The logo though is in that location and it doesn’t seem to hurt the overall design of the site. Above the banner is links to the top right that allow for joining an email club, following on Facebook, and reserving a table, with the latter in bright orange font. On the page there is images of the front of the building, food, and a mention of free WiFi. Finally a footer with an address and legal info. Clicking the menu link a new page opens with the same banner at the top but now with a sub header menu with specific dining times, brunch, lunch, dinner, ect. clicking each of these results in another page transfer and a simple list divided into categories with items descriptions and prices. The other primary navigation links offer there own purpose, all done with unified design, and a fairly elegant as their description promises.
Now to Center Ave. Slice. The websites home page is simple, a large red header box takes up about a fourth of the screen, “Center Avenue Slice” is in a bold sans serif centered above a menu of links; Home, Specials, Menu, Contact. These are easily visible but don’t seem to be in the correct order, the most important item, “menu” is third in with “home” being the first. The homepage is really an about page, because it features an embedded commercial, images of the food, a map, and a short biographical paragraph. The other menu links each take you to a page that serves it’s purpose, although the specials page features a lot of coupons marked expired and only one that is usable at the very bottom of the page. The Menu is simply two high resolution images of the print copy of the menu. This seems to work because you really get all the information you need to order including hours, address and phone number from this single page. The contact link allows you to see an embedded google map of the location as well as the ability to send a message to the company including your name email and phone number along with your message. The overall look of the site is minimalistic in the accidental kind of way but really lacks the polish that it could have.
After looking into both sites i’m going to compare the two using Krug’s important “things” for users to understand a site. Site ID is the name of the company whose site you’re using, and usually includes a tagline as to what they do. On both sites we see the Site ID centered on the page, a strange choice as it is usually found on the top left of the page, but in any case on both sites you can clearly see it and know where you are on the internet. Page name is the name that appears in the head of html code and in the tab of your internet browser. Once again both pages use these tools to help the user, but in the case of Six Penn the page name also includes the site ID. As an example the location page of each site is named as follows, “Location|Six Penn” and “Location” the latter being that of Center Ave. Slices site. The addition of the site ID helps the user who has multiple restaurant websites up at once, which occurs often when deciding between two or more places to eat. Primary navigation is the main menu so to speak, the most important links on the page. They run along the header in both sites but as mentioned before the order of Six Penn’s links makes more sense than that of Center Ave. Slice’s. The local navigation is the second level of menus, in this case only Six Penn has a second level of navigation, with Center Ave. Slice having one page per main link. Location indicators are simply ways that the user can tell where they are in the site. In the case of both restaurants they use slight changes in the primary links to show which of them you are currently viewing. Six Penn’s change to green when on their pages, and Center Ave. Slice’s are surrounded by a lighter box when selected. Finally a search bar, which is a way of finding pages on a site using inputted text. Neither site has a search bar, this is something that could help the type of person who has no time or care to look through a whole site for information. Having most of the important things helps both sites to be adequate for what is needed of it, with most of the differences being in time and polish put into the design of the site.