For the final project, my group is doing a fusion restaurant on a burger joint restaurant. The restaurant I chose to compare it to be Tessaro’s, which is another burger joint restaurant. Opening up Tessaro’s website, the first thing I realize is how little is on most of the pages. The homepage just has a slideshow of photo’s that has a little bit of everything the restaurant has to offer. Also, there’s only three tabs and only one is a dropdown menu. The menu tab just takes you straight to the menu and you have to search the whole thing to find what you want. The about us tab is the one that has a drop down menu. It has three selections for our story, remembering Kelly, and reviews. Then the last tab is a contact us tab. In the our story is just a basic set up of a photo of the building and with the story of how this restaurant began. The next page is a page to remember the founder Kelly Harrington. This description is longer than the story of the restaurant, and also it doesn’t say how Kelly died or when he died which I think would be information people would want to know. The reviews page have a decent amount of reviews, but I wish there would be numbers there as well to show what people are giving the restaurant a rating because guests want to know that. Finally, the contact us tab only has the address, phone number, and location map which this tab looks really pointless because there’s so much space on the left side and the contact info is on every page and it makes this page not too appealing. The colors though I don’t find appealing, especially if it’s just a Pittsburgh type restaurant because there doesn’t seem to have significance to them with the black background and red text. The Tessaro logo though is in white text. There isn’t really much texture either with just the plain back background, and little navigation. Some of the pages that are longer like the menu and the remembering Kelly tab has a button to go back to the top. Also, you can click on the logo whenever you want to take you back to the homepage, but unless you put your cursor over it, I don’t think it would be noticeable if you didn’t go looking for it.
As far as guiding through the content, I feel it’s a simple set up, but I feel aspects are missing or in the case of the menu feel it should be broken up more. Instead of having the whole menu on one page, have it broken up so people can find things quicker that they’re looking for. Besides things already mentioned, what I think is missing is hours of operation and specials as well. People look for opportunities to get better deals and if a restaurant doesn’t have any specials to offer, they would prefer another restaurant to go to over another. Also, if people don’t know operating hours, they won’t know when they’re able to go.
To compare, I think my group’s website will become more successful than this one. We are going to have more tabs to navigate to find things easier and have the information restaurants want to see. We have our menu broken down into food, drinks, and specials. We also have an eClub to have special offers and another way to grow business. Our color scheme also is more appealing since it is a Pittsburgh themed restaurant with the colors of black and gold. Also, our design is more interesting because we aren’t slapping plain colors on and using a nice gray texture for the background.