Review of sixpennkitchen.com and www.peterallens.com
Sixpennkitchen.com is a fairly simple, but soundly designed website. The homepage has the primary navigation bar at the top that stays there throughout the site including the site ID as the biggest icon. It has utilities in the top right and information at the bottom that follows on the whole site as well. When navigating to a different page, it has the “you are here” indicators as talked about in the book. On the menu section it has local navigation below the primary bar to go between the different menus.
Peterallens.com is another well designed site, but a little bit fancier that sixpennkitchen.com, while still getting the point across. This site also has the site id, primary navigation, page name, utilities, and a bottom bar with information that is on every page. The menu bar is at the top along with the site id. The differences are really just the placement and some more eye-pleasing attributes such as the gif of the food in the background, and the page name being placed under the navigation bar. The home page has a welcome blurb talking about the restaurant. Overall though, the content is pretty similar between the two sites.
Compare: balance, unity, emphasis, and layout
Both websites have a good balance to them. They are both centered for the most part, but peterallens.com has the site ID on the left while sixpennkitchen.com has it centered in the middle of the menu bar. Sixpennkitchen.com has the site id slightly bigger than the rest of the menu, so with emphasis your eye goes to there first. It is the same with the other site, except it is way larger and definitely more appealing and holds your focus better. Peterallens.com does a good job of using emphasis on where to look first. It goes from the site ID to the background gif then to the page name or welcome blurb, and then the actual content. Sixpennkitchen.com also does a good job while being a bit more basic. The layout’s are both really similar with the menu bar, bottom bar, etc. They are both simple and effective and create a strong unity with both websites. Nothing looks really out of place and everything seems to fit together well on both sites. Both sites have everything included in the trunk test except a search bar, which really is not needed as much for a restaurant website. Overall, both sixpennkitchen.com and peterallens.com are solid designed websites according to the book and the principles of design. Sixpennkitchen.com is more basic, but still gets the job done just as well as peterallens.com
Tristan Coyle