Review 3

For Review 3 I decided to explore and compare no9park.com and burgatorybar.com.  No. 9 park is a self described flagship restaurant in Boston’s Beacon Hill. Overall the look and feel of the site makes No. 9 Park to be a very high end/fancy restaurant.  While I have never been here, this feeling the site gives you seems to be for good reason, with there being private dining and a menu with some very high prices. The sites layout mostly consists of a background of photos of the restaurant with headlines in each photo followed by sections of text separating the photos.  There is a clear sense of unity with the site with every page having a very similar layout and the same global navigation bar being at the top of every page. The hierarchy of the site is clear and well defined with a its site name at the top of every page and then headlines to sections of text. No. 9 Park’s site is well designed making it clear what is clickable in its global navigation, breaking up of pages into logical sections, and keeping the site very simple and quiet.  The next site I looked at was burgatorybar.com. The website for Pittsburgh’s small burger chain, Burgatory. The site’s layout is very similar to that of no9park.com’s, making the photos of the restaurant be the main emphasis. The sites global navigation bar takes advantage of drop downs more so than no9park.com did. Where No. 9 Park placed there entire food menu on one continuous page, burgatory decided to separate each sections of the menu into a page itself. With Burgatory’s customization options, I believe this separation to be purposeful in order to minimize having a crazy amount of content placed on one page.  While this separation works for Burgatory, I do not believe it would have been as effective on that of No. 9 Parks site. Their menu seems to be much smaller, only needing 5 sections of separation where Burgatory splits the menu dropdown into eleven. Burgatory also has a clear sense of unity with its color palette similar layout among each page. The hierarchy throughout the site is clear with each headline having a line under and over making it more as a graphic of the page. The site is much alike no9park.com; being very simple thus creating a very visually quiet site with its use of hard edges to each section of content.  Overall I do not believe one site is more effective than the other. Each of them take advantage of conventions to convey the feeling of what the restaurant is like. With No. 9 Park being a much fancier, private dining and reservation type and Burgatory being a more casual sports bar restaurant.